


robininthelabyrinth tumblr fills part 2

by nirejseki, robininthelabyrinth (nirejseki)



Series: tumblr fills [2]
Category: Babylon 5, DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Animals, Cute Kids, Lovecraftian Monster(s), M/M, Pining, Short fills, Time Travel, Vampires, awkward nonsexual bed sharing, domestic AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2018-08-11
Packaged: 2019-01-08 08:05:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 70
Words: 58,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12250356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/robininthelabyrinth
Summary: a collection of tumblr replies that I deem too short to be their own fic - flash fics, meme fills, etc.8/11/2018 - coldflash Red Riding Hood smut





	1. coldwave, Len as a time vampire

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: What if Oculus!Len, when he comes back, returns as a sort of time vampire? Basically instead of needing blood to feed on, he feeds on the temporal energy that surrounds time travelers... Can you imagine Eobard's surprise should he try and recruit that Len? Or the Legends when they find out?
> 
> Not quite the full prompt, but I hope you like it anyway!

It wasn't the worst thing that could've happened.

It's pretty bad, yes, but it's not the _worst_ possible thing.

He could be dead.

Technically, Len reflects wryly, he _is_ dead.

He's just also a leech. 

A leech currently swimming through the whole goddamn time stream trying to find his particular group of time travelers, but a leech nonetheless.

Len hadn't known that creatures that fed on temporal energy – all sorts, regular people and time travelers and speedsters and sometimes timepieces - even _existed_ , much less that he could turn into one of them if he got 'frozen' in a massive outpouring of temporal energy. 

Frozen, because technically Len's body is still back there, frozen in that eternal moment of exploding. 

Center of a black hole, baby. 

A singularity that sucks in even time. 

That singularity sucked in Len and the rest of the Time Masters, and a lot of that structure, and it dumped them in the Topsy-Turvy. 

Well, that's what Len's been calling it, anyway. It's not quite another universe, not quite a reflection, but boy does Len feel like he went through the looking glass to get there.

The Topsy-Turvy is built on more dimensions than just four, for one thing. Len tries not to think about it too hard, or his head will explode.

Quite literally, as most of the Time Masters found out.

Len had been too busy having a panic attack about what the fuck stupid thing he just did to really pay attention to what was going on, which gave the Creatures enough time to convert him into the leech he is now. 

The process had taken only seconds. Len was (is?) now unmoored from his frozen body stuck back in the Topsy-Turvy, able to swim through the time stream like some sort of demented spawning salmon (the Creatures thought Len's comparisons were hilarious), but condemned to feed off the temporal processes of the living.

If he tried to feed off normal people, they got old. 

Sometimes they stayed where they were, sometimes time itself went by and they woke up a good five months or twenty years later, but either way, they lost some of their life. 

Luckily, time travelers and speedsters gave off temporal energy like crazy people - more than enough for a leech like him to feed on for a good long while without harming anyone.

Of course, most Creatures from the Topsy-Turvy didn't really understand the whole concept of consent, and that's why they were commonly mistaken for monsters. Or, at times, fairies.

Len's about 90% sure that Rip van Wrinkle was some poor sod who had the misfortune to be some Creature's first feeding before he figured out which way was up.

He's somewhat worried that Creature might've been him.

It'd taken a _while_ for him to regain his footing.

Luckily, he’s not doing that to anyone else. He steals little bits of time, snacks and bites barely large enough to keep him full; he’s been advised by those with some experience in the matter to just find himself a group of time-travelers to fix things and keep a proper meal with him at all times, but he doesn’t want to just find _any_ group, he wants to find _his_ specific group of time-travelers.

He misses them.

Okay, he’s not going to lie, he mostly misses Mick. And Lisa, though Lisa he managed to catch up with due to her being smart enough to stay in one time and place; Mick, on the other hand, Mick kept up with the time-traveling bucket of bozos for some reason (Len thinks he knows the reason, and feels guilty), and now Len can’t find him.

At least he’s in decent company, Len figures. Jax actually cared about Mick, even when everyone had thought Len had killed him; Sara’s pretty good at cards and has a low-key, friendly way about her – just as long as she’s never put in charge of anything other than tactical strikes, because major strategic decisions make her stress level go through the roof, see example a: Russian gulag; and Ray Palmer keeps trying to be Mick’s buddy.

Len’s sure they’re taking good care of Mick. Mick needs the care – he’s more fragile than people think, softness hiding underneath his thick tough hide, and he likes being able to rely on people he trusts to guide him; that’s usually Len’s job, but Len’s still struggling with this whole 'not a human' thing and it'll be good to have some support. 

The crew – they call themselves ‘Legends’ or something, which sounds more like a Fall Out Boy song than a proper team name – will be taking good care of Mick. 

And, well, if they’re not, he can always eat them. 

Len will figure it out once he _finds_ them. 

Which is taking longer than expected.

For one thing, all of time and space is a pretty damn big haystack to find a needle.

For another, Len’s still not a hundred percent on this whole 'Creature in the regular world' business.

The Creatures are pretty good about taking care of him whenever he flees the usual universe to take refuge in the Topsy-Turvy, which he did pretty often at first and still every once in a while now when he just gets plain overwhelmed, but they didn't really understand humans. Ninth-dimensional possibly Lovecraftian beings just didn't have the life experience to connect with people like Len. 

Len's lonely. 

And worse, he's pretty sure Mick still thinks he's dead. 

Besides, of the whole slew of people who ended up dragged into the singularity with him, most are dead (see: head blowing up) and only about half a dozen survived the conversion process.

The Creatures encouragingly say that their 2% survival rate is the best they've had in millennia. 

Of course, the Creatures also then pitted them against each other in death matches and bet on it - forget math, _gambling_ is universal - which narrowed the numbers a bit further.

Basically, Len and some guy named Booster are the only ones left, and they cordially detest each other in a way that only two people frantically clinging to each other because they're the only two things that remember what being human is like while being stuck in a world full of mathematically improbable monsters can. 

For one thing, Booster reminds Len of some awful conglomeration of Ray Palmer and Rip Hunter.

For another, they've been literally sharing the one human-style bed the Creatures managed to create for them for nearly a year. It's a narrow single and they're both grown men.

Len would categorize them as friends, but friends that would be deeply, deeply relieved if they never had to spend more than ten minutes in each other's presence ever again.

They work much better communicating long-distance. 

And, of course, speak of the devil and he appears -

"You found them yet?" Booster asks. His voice just appears in Len's ear, just like having one of Rip's high-end communication devices in if you forget the fact that A, they're in different times and places and B, _there is no communication device_.

Stupid fifth-dimensional communication.

"If you don't have a lead for me, we're still not talking," Len tells him.

"I said sorry already! Also, I think I have a lead for you."

"I'm listening."

"Aruba."

"I'm not listening."

"No, wait - I'm serious! This isn't a sneaky attempt to make you go on vacation!"

"Unlike the last seven times?"

"Not my fault you work too hard. You don't even have a _job_ , I don't know why you -"

"Booster."

"- right, rant over. Anyway. Aruba. 2017. I'm sending pictures now."

Len reaches into his pocket and pulls out the photographs, carefully not thinking about how they weren't there a minute ago. 

It's -

It's _them_. 

They're in stupid beachwear, and Mick is in the _king_ of stupid beachwear, involving two layers of shirt (one tourist Hawaiian print) and a sarong. 

He looks just like he always has, the big goober. 

Len's throat feels tight, and for once it's not because he forgot to steal people's coffee break time ('where did the time go?' they bitch as they head back into the office, 'I feel like I just got out here').

"Be careful," Booster warns. "There's been a lot of weird stuff going on in this period."

Len nods. "Thanks for the tip," he says, and then he leaps into the time stream, eeling through green swirls that he breathes in like air, inhuman and leech-like. He hopes Mick doesn't mind. 

And then he's there.

Aruba. 2017.

Mick.

A set of time travelers that Len can stick with and drain slow, or - if they piss off Len and his newfound claustrophobia - visit occasionally while he uses the Flash's endless collection of speedsters as his main source of substance. 

_Mick_.

Len isn't entirely how to explain what's happened and how he turned into a temporal leech-thing (time vampire, Booster calls them) without going into eighth-dimensional mathematical concepts, but he can't wait to give it a try.

Mick Rory, here I come.


	2. Coldwave, Len as pyromaniac

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to prompt: AU where Len is the pyromaniac

"Hey," a gentle voice is saying. "Hey. Can you look at me?"

Len doesn't want to. He just wants to stay here and luxuriate in the glorious feeling of relief he felt. All that tension, all that anger, all locked away deep inside, it _needed_ to be let out - and now it was.

It was -

Wait.

How long has he been here?

Len blinks. His eyes hurt; they feel crusty and sore like he's had them open too long. He's dissociating again, most likely.

"Hey. You with me?"

Mick.

Len feels the hot flush of shame. "I did it again," he says dully. "Didn't I?"

And he'd tried so hard not to, too...

"Yeah," Mick says. "It's okay. You couldn't help it."

Mick's the best, but Len doesn't deserve him. They'd met in juvie - Mick had saved Len's ass in juvie, more correctly, and in more ways than just the shiv that'd been heading Len's way - and Len had made him promise they'd team up again when they were adults. And Mick had kept that promise, tracking Len down years later when he'd finished out his juvie-to-prison term and some of his mandatory probation period, the part before his conviction had been overturned, and between the two of them, they'd scraped up enough for an apartment.

An apartment that Len keeps _burning_. 

Mick says he doesn't mind. He says it's all shitty furniture anyway; so no one will notice a few more burn marks. He says that at least Len's too much of a hypochondriac to be a smoker, so the smoke and the ash don't have nicotine in them. He says -

He says a lot of things. 

But Len knows better.

Mick is _terrified_ of fire - and rightfully so. His whole family burned, suffocated by carbon monoxide, crisped up in flames, burned black and buried under the wooden beams of Mick's old childhood home. 

Mick got blamed for it, sent to juvie for a crime he didn't commit, and it was only years later, when a lazy and corrupt investigator had been revealed in an unrelated sting and all of his old conclusions reviewed, that they'd found that Mick _couldn't_ have set the fire and all those years in prison had been for nothing.

See, Mick's parents were pieces of work, and Len knows what he's talking about with shitty parents. Len's own dad beat him half to hell and back when he was a kid, calling it lessons for real life - still did, sometimes, when he was around and not off on some mob job or behind bars, even though Len is mostly smart enough now not to believe him when he said it was for Len's own good - but at least he didn't dress it up in religion and make Len an outcast in the community. 

Mick's parents were religious nutjobs, though, and when Mick started acting weird - his dyslexia, high-functioning autism, and childhood epilepsy never properly diagnosed because those assholes didn't believe in doctors that didn't use praying - they'd decided he was possessed by evil spirits.

Evil spirits that needed to be frozen out in the giant-ass meat locker with the time lock they kept in their basement. 

That was the real reason why Mick had survived the fire that had ravaged his house. Not because he'd been in on it, or because he'd been a coward and run away, but because he'd been locked away down below, shivering, in a temperature-controlled box that the fire couldn't touch. And then, in the morning, the time lock sprung open - five thirty a.m., time for chores - and Mick had gone upstairs and been found there, standing in the ash.

Years later, when even the most basic examination of the house and interviews with the neighbors revealed this, and also the fact that the fire was clearly the result of some faulty wiring, some asshole social worker'd asked Mick why he hadn't just told everyone what happened.

Mick had said that he didn't tell anyone because he didn't want anyone to know about the evil spirits. He'd rather a fresh start in prison than to go back to how his family had treated him. 

Len hates everyone and everything that reminded Mick of those times. He fought anyone who made a joke about exorcisms, and punched door-to-door religious recruiters who probably didn't deserve it, but he didn't hate anyone more than he hates himself.

Himself, who lights fires in Mick's home, where he should be safe from all this. 

Len doesn't even have a good sob story reason for it. Sure, his dad hit him, but it was only to toughen him up (and to get his own anger out on someone who couldn't fight back - Len gets that now that Mick's explained it a few dozen times) and there's no reason, _no reason_ he should be starting fires all the time just to relieve that endless anxiety that always hovers over him – endless, always present, but for when he lights his fires. 

Mick gets all tight-lipped when Len says that, though. Mick says that breaking a kid's arm and locking him in his room with no lights except a box of matches the kid stole earlier is enough. He says kicking a kid out of the house on winter nights so cold that Len only survived by burying himself under snow and sleeping next to lit-up garbage cans is enough. He says that making Len learn how to cook all by himself on their stupid finicky old gas stove that never caught right when he was only five because no one else was going to feed him now that his mom was dead, and again when he was eight because no one else was heating up milk and formula to feed the baby, is enough of a reason to make anyone go to the flames for comfort, because they sure weren't getting it anywhere else. 

Len's still not sure it's as bad as Mick makes it sounds - his dad always called 'em lessons, lessons that Len's spent most of his life trying to keep Lisa from learning - but he's stopped arguing about it.

It's the least he can do, since he can't seem to actually stop lighting the fires. 

"- something to eat?" Mick is saying. He's put out the small fire Len started, and he's cleaning up the table. 

Looks like Len's lost some time, which happens sometimes but especially after he lights up, but since Mick's still talking, it couldn't have been too long. 

"Sure," Len says. "Anything you like."

Mick opens his mouth.

"That isn't salad," Len adds hastily. 

"Salad is good for you," Mick says with a sniff. 

Len feels a stab of guilt. Mick's always thinking of what's good for Len. 

"We can have salad," he says. "If you want."

Mick looks at him with a frown. "I was kidding, Len. I know you hate salad. The only way I get you to eat vegetables is by roasting or sautéing them."

"You mean when you cast a magic spell on them to make them taste good and not like vegetable."

"That magic spell is called olive oil and salt," Mick says dryly. "Maybe a bit of paprika, you have a weird thing for that."

Paprika, Len assumes, is what makes everything in the oven a cheerful red color. He likes that color. 

"Len, what's the matter?" Mick asks.

"Nothing's the matter!" Len says immediately, on the defensive even though he doesn't need to be. 

Mick just looks at him.

"Why do you think something's the matter?" Len tries.

"You just agreed to eat salad if I wanted."

...a fair point.

"Also, you usually start fires in the tires in the backyard, not the living room -"

Len starts guiltily. He hadn't known that Mick knew about the tires. 

"- which means you were freaking out pretty bad when you got home. What happened?" Mick's eyes narrow. "Did your dad come by?"

He starts looking Len over for hidden bruises.

"No, he's still off in Starling," Len says quickly. "No need to worry."

"Then what is it?"

Len swallows. He'd been hoping to have some more time to build up to it. "I've got us a new job."

"Good," Mick says, though he looks a bit confused. They do heists pretty often - they're reliable enough freelancers that they get hired by crews around the city, though they don't really have the type of specializations that would get them a job on a permanent thief crew, and the way the split works for junior crew members means they only get so much out of each heist - and it's not usually a big deal. Nothing to freak out over. "We need to pay next month's rent and buy enough food, which would be tricky on top of Lisa's skating lessons -" That's always top priority, even if it meant going hungry or homeless for a bit. Sure, Mick's eventually going to get a payout from the city for that whole wrongful conviction thinge, but that was still in progress and in the meantime they still had to pay Mick's lawyers. "- so a job would be good. Who's running it?"

"Uh," Len says, swallowing. "That's the thing." 

"Not a Family job!"

"No, no! Nothing like that!"

Lewis works with the Families, and as such, Mick won't have anything to do with them. That always sounded like a reasonable rule to Len, who didn't like the Families either. 

"Then what?"

"Uh," Len says again, very eloquently. "It's, uh. It's me."

"Huh?" Mick asks, clearly lost. 

"It's - it's my job," Len confesses. "No, that doesn't mean you're not in on it too -" Mick looked ready to argue for a second there, but the reassurance moves him back to confused. "- it's, uh. I'm the one running it. The job."

He braces himself for disapproval. He and Mick have done small things on their own before - ATM robberies, corner store stick-ups - but never a major job. Never anything requiring a crew.

A crew that Len will have to manage and command.

Len - crazy, unstable pyromaniac Len. 

Who can't even keep from starting a fire in his own living room.

God, why the hell did he think this was a good idea again?!

Mick's going to gently point out that it's a terrible idea and then they'll have to figure out how to extract themselves from it after all the promises Len made to the backers and the crew and the fences and -

"Good," Mick announces. "You'll be better at it than any of those assholes."

Len blinks.

"You - really think so?" he says cautiously. "You think I can handle running my own crew?"

"Sure do," Mick says, so firmly that even Len can't believe that he's just humoring Len. "You're gonna make it big, Lenny. Just you wait."

Len's chest hurts, that warm bright sort of hurting that he gets around Mick, the sort that's _even better_ than the curl of attraction he gets to women and men in the clubs that he goes to when he wants to get laid, because it's a bit like that and a bit like how he feels when he looks at Lisa, all bursting with pride, and that's how he knows he's head-over-goddamn-heels in love with his best friend and criminal partner, because Mick can always make him feel this way with an offhand statement or an expression of faith.

"I'm gonna make you proud," Len promises, dead serious. No distractions mid-job for him, no sir; he's going to pull this off. He's going to be good. 

No. He's going to be _great_.

_They’re_ going to be great. 

"And I'll be there to watch your back," Mick replies, equally serious. 

Len wouldn't have it any other way.


	3. coldwave, frank/matt - domestic AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set in @jewishfrankcastle's domestic AU where Mick and Len have retired to a farm and are villainously herding a small armada of children and animals - all details come from that. For their birthday, @jewishfrankcastle requested Frank Castle and Matt Murdock meeting Len and Mick. Happy birthday, @jewishfrankcastle!!!

They meet, perhaps unsurprisingly, at the dog park. 

Frank's never been to Central before - his work tends a bit more towards exotic or politically influential locations, but there are corrupt cops and murderers everywhere, and that means he goes everywhere. 

He's been mostly focusing on corrupt cops and politicians lately, rather than run-of-the-mill murderers - Matt'd made a good point in their last dust-up about how people abusing the levers of powers were full on destroying the systems that most normal people relied on, while random murderers sometimes had reasons. 

Never excuses, but reasons. 

And, well, in the heat of the moment Frank'd had some sort of pithy remark about how vigilantes weren't really part of the system either, so _there_ Murdock, but after the adrenaline faded, Frank had to give him the point. Frank's always focused mostly on gangs for a reason - institutional power's a bitch - and it seems wrong not to go after the biggest blue-clad gang of them all.

Especially given how often corrupt cop seemed to be synonymous with murderer nowadays. 

Anyway, he and Matt ended up settling their differences the way they usually did these days - talking shit at each other till their voices start getting hoarse, then one of 'em making a final call. If Frank thought there was something particularly vile about 'em, he'd end them his way; if Matt was dead on convinced that they were innocent or something, Frank'd let Matt rescue the scumsucker.

And then they'd go off their separate ways, of course, and bicker about it some more over a few cups of hot cocoa back at home.

It is, no two ways about it, the weirdest relationship Frank's ever been in, but what the hell, it makes them both happy. Frank likes things that make him happy, and nowadays he tries to keep life simple.

Unfortunately, simple doesn’t always agree with him about that.

Take this trip to Central, for instance. Frank'd gotten a tip-off about the organized crime in Central (they called them Families here, with chewed off syllables and a grimace of distaste), some offshoot of which was forcing kids to traffic their drugs with their families at gun point, with corrupt cops on the payroll ready to bury any confession by any kid dumb enough to try to turn on them. 

Ready to bury any kid, too, and call it self-defense. 

So Frank'd packed up his shit (Matt likes to tease him about how many suitcases he packs, but he has no room to talk; Frank's been on vacation with him before and he doesn't even bring guns!) and planned on heading out the way he always did, except Matt ended up being asked to join one of his weird slumber parties ("Defenders team-ups are not slumber parties!" yeah they are) and all their friends were out of town, and that meant there was no one to watch Max.

Which, fine. Frank's used to taking Max with him when he goes out - poor dog's a sweetheart and perfectly happy to stay in a safe place while Frank does what needs to be done, but Frank's starts feeling bad if he doesn't let Max stretch his legs a bit.

Thus the dog park.

Most people there have these dumb little city dogs that they try to keep away from Max, probably because they're bigoted assholes that buy into the whole 'pit bulls are evil' crap, and Frank's just about to drop his disguise sunglasses (Matt thinks they're hilarious, but seriously, the red-glasses-wearing kettle can stop calling the pot black any day now) to glare at the fuckers keeping Max from having a good time when some big ol' fucker walks into the park with two pits and a mutt, none of which he's keeping leashed, and everyone just -

Relaxes?

Seriously, they stop clutching at their Pekingese and Bichon Frises and shit and let 'em go to scamper around smelling each other’s butts, and Max is in doggie seventh heaven or some shit. 

The tough guy - six-foot-something with a bull's worth of muscle on him, shaved bald and looking dangerous - looks around the park, spots Frank, and comes over.

Doesn't sit right next to him, no intimidation shit or anything that Frank might be inclined to take issue with, but close enough that having a chat's not a big deal. 

If anything, the rest of the park gets even more relaxed.

Guy don't say nothing for a couple of minutes, so Frank decides to start up this ballgame.

"People here sure are friendly," he says. 

The big guy snorts. "Sure they are," he says, voice halfway between ironic and fond. "Once they know you ain't Family or a pig of the human variety."

Frank straightens up, kinda insulted. They thought _he_ was a mobster? Or a cop? _Him_?

"Easy now," the guy laughs. "They know you ain't one anymore, now that I'm here, but you can't blame 'em for being wary."

"Now that you're here?" Frank echoes.

"I hate Family," the guy says. "A lot. And my partner hates corrupt cops - most cops, not gonna lie, but corrupt ones worst of all - and we ain't shy about chasing them outta our parts of the city."

"Your parts of the city?"

"The slums," the guy clarifies. "Where half the population or more's taken a swing by our resident jail cells - that's Iron Heights, here, and I'd avoid it if at all possible if I were you."

"And here I heard the thing to avoid was the Flash," Frank says, unable to keep from commenting on the superhero-shaped elephant in the room. He'd started seeing the memorabilia nearly a hundred miles away, and in Central proper it gets positively overwhelming.

And a little concerning, Frank's not gonna lie. He's used to superheroes like Matt, like Matt's friends - some powers, yeah, but kinda down to earth like. People he could stop with a bullet (or, in Luke's case, a bunch of nets or superglue or something; he's still working on that). He's not quite sure what to do with someone who can purportedly catch a bullet in midair and have Frank on the ground before he's had time to fire the next one. 

He's planning on getting his business in town done quick and quiet and hopefully over before he has to make the guy's acquaintance.

"He's easy enough to avoid," the guy says with a shrug. "Especially this time of year; it's gorilla season."

Frank pauses, because he's gotta have heard that wrong. 

"Yeah, gorillas," the guy confirms. He sounds tired out just thinking about 'em. "Some lab cooked up a super intelligent gorilla with telepathic powers -"

"What the fuck."

"I know right? Anyway, the Flash ended up tossing that gorilla somewhere in another universe or some bullshit like that - don't ask, you don't want to know -"

Guy's right. Frank really, _really_ doesn't.

"- and it turns out _that_ universe has its _own_ gangs of super-intelligent gorillas, and once a year they manage to open a portal back to our earth to try to invade. That's how you get -"

"-gorilla season," Frank finishes. "Jesus."

"Yeah."

They sit in companionable silence for a while. 

"Your big pit's got a lot of scars," Frank eventually observes. The big one's all scarred, while the smaller one's a bit roughed up but no more than a bit of tough living would get him. The last one, the mutt, he's just a goddamn lazy shit, rolling around on the grass and barely getting up to prance around, but he seems fine. "That something we should be talking about?"

The guy shoots Frank an approving look, of all things. "Nah," he says. "We rescued Tony from a Family dogfighting operation that we were shutting down with prejudice, if you know what I mean."

Well, shucks. Look at that. Frank thinks he may have made a friend.

Matt is _never_ gonna believe him. 

"Got my Max much the same way," Frank says. "New York gang."

"Fuckers," the guy says agreeably. "The smaller one, Poppy, we got her the same way, but she was new, y'know? Hadn't gotten to too much fighting yet. Well. She fights with the goats - my partner and I own a farm outside of town," he adds, seeing Frank's raised eyebrows. "That's where she gets all those band-aids from."

Frank buys it. Those band-aids are cute enough, but also located just where an exasperated goat might decide to butt an irritating dog away. 

"And the mutt?" he asks, nodding at the dog, which seems to have decided to take a nap.

"Turtle."

Frank snorts.

"Yeah, he's _always_ like that," the guy laughs, and that’s that. They sit around, don’t talk, and it’s all nice and domestic and shit until it’s time for Frank to collect Max and go. 

Of course, next time they run into each other, Frank’s in the middle of a warehouse with a bunch of screaming children and a lot of dead mobsters, splattered all over in blood and trying to figure out if he should’ve worn gloves because he can’t exactly go on picking up kids with bloody hands, now can he? 

Big guy – Frank never got his name – walks through the door, holding some weird sort of reddish gun. 

Frank blinks at him.

Guy blinks back.

“Well, that saves me some trouble,” the guy says. “How’d you get tipped off about this before I did? You’re not even local.”

“They picked a kid whose parents kicked her out for being trans,” Frank says. “After all the work she’d been putting in to save their asses from these assholes, too. No idea how she got my number.”

“Guess she was really pissed,” the guy says. He’s as agreeable as ever, even though they’re surrounded in a sea of blood and bunch of dead mobsters. “I probably would’ve just scared the shit outta ‘em for the first offense.”

“I don’t really believe in first offences when kids are involved,” Frank says. 

Said kids have also stopped crying and screaming, actually, even though they're still just as traumatized. If anything, though, they're looking at big guy like he's come to rescue them - which, hey! Frank did all the hard work here! One of the kids actually pipes up and goes, “Can you get us home, Heatwave?”

That's the most coherent thing any of 'em have said since Frank arrived, guns blazing. He'd been trying to get words outta them for ten minutes before this. 

“Sure thing, kiddo,” the big guy (Heatwave?) says, then looks at Frank. “You need a place to crash while the heat dies down on you for this?”

Frank makes a face. He’d been planning on getting bloody, of course, but maybe not quite _this_ bloody, and a classic Punisher attack will bring the Feds down like nothing else. And Feds mean road blockades, and he’s got Max to think about. 

Aw, what the hell. This guy seems pretty cool. Even the kids seem to trust him, and the kids don't trust _Frank_ even after he's rescued 'em, which is clearly a sign of good discernment and excellent survival skills. 

“Sure,” he says. Then, awkwardly, he sticks out a hand and says, “Frank Castle.”

The guy shakes (ignoring the blood) and says, “Mick Rory.”

The name pings something familiar, but Frank can’t recall what. His memory’s not the best nowadays. 

Rory ushers everyone outside and does a quick check of the area to make sure nobody’s still in there, just in case, and then he takes that dinky little water-gun-looking red thing in his hand and lights the whole goddamn place on fire. 

“What the hell,” Frank says. That gun should _not_ be able to make a flame that large. “You know that won’t cover my tracks, right?”

The Feds have gotten to tracking Frank's bullets. Frank doesn't mind - he likes getting credit for what he's done.

“It’s not for that,” Rory says. 

Then he stops and waits for something, Frank’s not sure what.

And then Frank does know what, because there’s a goddamn burst of _yellow lightning_ and suddenly there’s a kid in a red suit standing there where he definitely wasn’t standing before. The rumors were _not_ kidding about the Flash’s speed. 

“Mick, what are you doing?” the kid says, hands on hips, frowning a little. “It’s not like you to go off without warning anymore. Aren’t you retired?”

Retired? Retired from what, _arson_?

No, wait. Heatwave. That was one of the Flash’s supervillains, part of that gang, whatever they’re called. Heat-themed guy, cold-themed guy, weather-themed guy…the Rogues or something like that. Frank’d heard decent things about them – rules about no killing women or kids or capes, no casualties at all when possible, focus on the money and even that aim at those that can afford to lose it – so he’d never really investigated. 

He had heard that they were in semi-retirement or something, though; they only came out once or twice a year. 

“Some Family offshoot got the big idea of getting kids to traffic for ‘em,” Mick tells the Flash, gesturing at the kids all huddled up by the wall.

The Flash looks stricken. “That’s awful,” he says, looking at them. “You guys okay?”

The kids nod. Their faces are all shining bright and cheerful now that a proper superhero’s here. 

Typical.

“Any of you undocumented?” the Flash then asks, which Frank is about to take exception to, except the Flash continues, “If you are, or any of your families are, I’ll get the police to sign off on a U-visa for helping stop a crime; maybe get that rushed through for you, make sure you get safe. If you don’t want to come forward, that’s okay too.”

Okay, fine, maybe this superhero kid doesn’t seem so bad.

“I’ll get them home,” the Flash tells Rory, who nods, satisfied. “Was there anyone, uh, inside the warehouse?”

“Not anymore,” Frank says.

The Flash squints at him, then his eyes go down to the skull on his vest and his eyes go a little wide. 

“I’m letting him crash at the farm,” Rory says before the kid can say anything. 

The kid just sighs, all the steam let out of him. “Of course you are.”

“He’s got a dog.”

“Of course he does.”

With that, the kid rolls his eyes and zips back into lightning speed, taking the kids away one by one. 

Rory catches Frank’s eye and jerks his head to the side. Frank follows him, feeling kinda out of his element on this one. He’s not really used to superheroes and villains hanging out all peaceful-like this way. 

“We’re retired,” Rory says, seeing his expression. “Mostly only do jobs on birthdays and anniversaries. Rest of the time, we’ve got a deal going that we’ll only act when people are being really awful, like here, and the Flash’ll just handle mop up.”

“That’s an interesting approach.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rory says, waving a hand. “Oh, hey, I’m gonna guess from your comments earlier about the trans kid that any of that stuff ain’t gonna be an issue?”

“Nope,” Frank says. “My, uh –” How does he even define Matt? His boyfriend? His superhero? His nemesis-with-benefits? His person-I’m-in-a-relationship-with-that-neither-of-us-are-characterizing-because-we-are-manly-men-incapable-of-properly-articulating-emotions? The last one’s probably the most accurate, let’s be real, but it’s a bit of a mouthful, and no one deserves to have a shit ton of Frank’s issues dumped on them at first meeting. “I’m seeing a trans guy,” he finally settles on, because, sure, he’s definitely seeing Matt. At least once a day, if he’s lucky. Of course, Matt isn’t ‘seeing’ him, if you want to get technical about it… “And I’m, uh. Nonbinary. Sometimes.”

“Fair,” Rory says, and Frank feels that moment of relief he always gets when he finds out he won’t have to shoot someone who helped him out for being a transphobic dickwad. “Same here, ‘cept my partner and I are married now. Do you mind being around kids? Living space-wise, not rescuing-wise.”

Frank gets that awful feeling in his gut that he gets every time he thinks about his own kids, his Lisa and his Frank Junior, and how they’re not here anymore, but he’s been trying to think of them as good things, trying to remember them as the bundles of light and joy that they were, as more than just the pile of blood and bone they ended up as, and even though that ain’t easy with the way his brain is wired now, he’s gotta try. So he says, “I like kids.”

“Good, ‘cause we’ve got a whole heap of ‘em,” Rory says. “Some of ‘em have moved out, and some of ‘em are shy as anything, so you’ll probably only see a few of ‘em, but, y’know, just fair warning.” He pauses, considering. “Also, my partner Len? He’s got the worst damn sense of humor you’ll ever meet. Want to warn you about that, too.”

“I can handle a sense of humor,” Frank says, and he goes on believing that right up until he follows Rory onto a nice little farm outside of Central and the guy standing in the kitchen – curvy guy, wearing a long-sleeved shirt, a skirt, skinny jeans and socks all together, despite the blisteringly hot weather – turns around and says, “I see you two have been having a bloody good time.”

“Len,” Rory says, sounding long-suffering.

“You know, when you said you were planning on painting the town red, I figured you meant metaphorically.”

“ _Len_.”

“Though, given your company, I guess it’s no surprise you decided to put your clothing through some serious punishment.”

Frank just starts laughing, because that’s the first time he’s ever been compared to Tide With Bleach, and he thinks to himself that he’s going to like Central more than he thought he would.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------

“I swear you’re gonna like ‘em,” Frank says encouragingly. 

Matt just shoots him a seriously skeptical look, like he still thinks Frank is making the whole thing up. And, sure, Frank going on a job and ending up becoming besties with two retired supervillains who live on a farm with a bunch of animals and an even larger gaggle of kids, kids that Frank likes, yeah, Frank can see that being a bit hard to swallow. 

But it’s true.

Len even used the words ‘besties’. He’d been dripping with sarcasm and doing air-quotes at the time, but Frank’d figured out pretty quick that the only way to put up with Len’s trolling was to go in with it, full-hog, and after one thing led to another, they were scheduled to have a frilly dolly tea party with Enku and Opan and baby Coral the afternoon after Frank arrives. Having met said kids, Frank figures there’s about a 90% chance of Enku getting bored and walking away after ten minutes (probably after having said something characteristically tactless to Matt; he’s already warned him), while little seven-year-old Opal and four-year-old Coral just watch in fascination as Frank and Len try to one-up each other in increasingly absurd levels of fake-niceness.

Frank’s been brushing up on his sign language just to make sure that Coral feels included in the battle royale. She might be little more than a toddler, but she is vicious, and Frank wants her on his side, hearing or no hearing. 

He figures Matt will be too busy having fun with the older kids to mock him for going to a four-year-old for help. Between Basi’s tendency to start fights and Tahmid’s tendency to get into them, there is zero chance that Matt won’t find some way to sneak out to go a-vigilantism-ing with them. 

Of course, Matt doesn’t actually have to sneak out – Len and Mick believe firmly in teaching their kids the meaning of the word ‘justice’ and the concept that when the law doesn’t do it, someone else has to make up the slack, but not too much because that'd interfere with the thieving they all like to do – but Matt will enjoy trying anyway. He won’t succeed. Nothing gets past the goats’ notice. Frank tried. 

Matt, meanwhile, is looking ahead to where the farm has just barely come into view. “Do they have cows?” he says dubiously.

“And pigs,” Frank says. “And horses, goats, dogs, cats, rats, and chickens. Avoid the chickens.”

“…why?”

“Chickens are dinosaurs, Red,” Frank says solemnly. “Just smaller.”

Matt shoots him a Look.

“Relax, city boy,” Frank says, cracking a smile. “You’ve got superpowers. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“This isn’t making me more comfortable with this,” Matt says dryly. “Tell me again how we’re going to go visit criminals?”

“Retired supervillains.”

“Which you bonded with over rescuing kids from organized crime.”

“And then we went out and hunted down a dog-fighting ring,” Frank says. He’d been very satisfied with how that visit had turned out. 

Matt is rolling his eyes. The glasses don’t hide it as well as he thinks they do. 

“And the local superhero may or may not be swinging by,” he says. 

“Running by,” Frank says. “I keep telling you, keep the swinging metaphors for the kid up in Queens.”

Frank likes the kid in Queens. He's an asshole. Sure, he agrees more with Matt than with Frank about how to deal with bad guys, but he’d made some snarky comments to Matt about the fatality rates of people with severe head trauma that endeared him to Frank forever. Matt's _still_ sulking. 

“Fine. The local superhero may be _running_ by. And – not arresting anyone?”

“They’re very nice supervillains.”

“Why is the superhero running by again, then?”

“Because he’s worried we might start some shit,” Frank explains, very patiently. He’s said it before, but he gets how it could sound weird. “He wants to make sure we ain't messing with his precious supervillains, and it only takes the kid something like three minutes, tops, to run from the city to the farm, check up on us, and head back, and that’s when he’s going at a casual speed."

Matt frowns.

“Yeah, I know, it’s weird. Don’t over-think it.”

“It’s too late,” Matt says, frown deepening. “I’m over-thinking it. Just mechanically, how does that work? What does he wear?”

“Low friction spaceman suits.”

“But the effect of his feet on the _streets_ …”

“Don’t think about it,” Frank advises again. “Just…don’t. It’s not worth it.” 

“I’m a lawyer. Overthinking things is what I do…how do they even determine the _mens rae/actus reus_ division for someone moving at that speed?”

“Red. Please.”

“But –“

“Hey, look at that!” Frank announces. “We’re here!”

He makes enough of a show of scrambling hastily out of the car that Matt’s laughing quietly to himself. 

Lapis, one of the teens, is on the porch, reading something; she looks up with the resigned world-weariness of goths and teenagers, the pinnacle of which can really only be reached by teenagers who _are_ goths (like Lapis).

"Nice to see you, ma'am," Frank says with his absolute best aw-shucks New York military kid attitude. 

There's only the slightest flicker of amusement on her lips - like all teens, she enjoys getting 'ma'am'ed in a way that she really won't in about five years - but Frank's pretty sure he can wear her down to in actual smile. Maybe even a laugh; he's feeling ambitious.

Sure, she's probably too cool to go outside the monotone even when she laughs, but a man's gotta try.

"Where're your parents?"

There's a definitely flicker of amusement this time.

"Watering the backyard," she says. "Pleased to meet you," she adds to Matt, then back into her book she goes.

Matt arches his eyebrows a bit, but he takes Frank's arm and lets himself be led in the direction of the backyard. He doesn't need leading, and Frank's already explained that Mick's ridiculously on-point ability to read people will mean that Matt's secret is a sooner rather than later reveal, but Matt insisted. 

Sometimes Frank thinks the whole blind lawyer disguise is like a security blanket for Matt. If only Matt would just admit that's the case, Frank would be a whole lot more understanding, but as it is, Matt likes to pretend he's doing it for increasingly dumb reasons that Frank can barely bring himself to pretend he believes and he already knows Matt knows he doesn't. 

Eh, they'll get over it. They wouldn't be them if they weren't squabbling over something stupid. 

In the backyard, Len and Mick are, in fact, watering the backyard.

"Frank," Matt says, very calmly. "Is it raining?"

"Just part of it. Over the yard," Frank says, watching - no small bit impressed - as some asshole waves his hands at the heat and cold guns Len and Mick are currently wielding and turns them somehow into rain.

"I need another cold front," the guy shouts. It's hard to hear over the miniature sized storm hovering over the lawn.

"I'll give you a goddamn cold front, Mardon," Len shouts back. "You want your torso or your legs to get it?"

"I'm doing you a goddamn favor, Snart!"

"And here I thought you were paying me back for all the times I broke you out of the Heights!"

"I think we've got enough water," Mick bellows from his side of the field.

"Thank God," the guy in the middle, Mardon, says, waving his hands again and making the whole cloud break into pieces until the sky above the fields is as bright and clear as the rest of it. "That’s it; I'm out."

And he goes.

"Come back next week, asshole!" Len shouts after him.

"Frank," Matt says, very quietly.

"Yeah, babe," Frank says, staring. "It’s not just you. He really did just up and fly away."

"...do they grow any form of hallucinogenic narcotics on this farm?" Matt asks suspiciously.

"Nah," Len says, holstering his gun. "Don't need the heat."

"Don't you dare start with those cold jokes again," Frank warns. 

"So you're the guy who's been leaving those awful voicemails," Matt says, smiling suddenly. "You're my best friend's new favorite person, just so you know."

Len preens. "And you must be Murdock," Len says. "Frank says good things."

"Call me Matt, please."

"Leonard Snart, but you can call me Len," Len says agreeably. "Want to get the city kid guide to animals tour? Raised in the slums myself, so I know all the highlights."

"I'd be delighted," Matt - who as of literally five minutes and the whole last three weeks had been protesting how much he _didn't_ care about farm animals - says with, as far as Frank can tell, all apparent sincerity. 

Len proceeds to swan off, Matt in tow.

"What just happened?" Frank asks the air, absolutely bewildered. He'd kind of figured on Matt and Mick being the ones to get on, given how prickly both Matt and Len could be.

"That, my friend, was a prime example of two world class asshole trolls recognizing a kindred spirit," Mick says, coming up behind him. "Be afraid. Be very afraid."

Yeah, Frank reflects, that sounds about right.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------

By the time they go home, the Flash has an invite to the Defenders if he ever wants one, Frank and Mick went after another dog-fighting kennel, Frank and Matt are leaving with one more dog than they arrived with, Matt may or may not be helping one of the kids write their law school admissions essay, and they've already arranged for Len and Mick and some of the kids to come visit them in New York in a few months. 

"I can't believe I made new friends," Matt says blankly. "Foggy and Claire are _never_ going to believe me."

"I know, right?" Frank says.


	4. coldwave and the daemons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have neither explanation nor excuse. Very silly.

" _Don't_ say it," Len says testily. 

Sara, who had opened her mouth, closes it, then just looks confused. 

"Really don't," Mick says. "He gets touchy about it."

Sara's about to crack a joke, Len can tell, but maybe she notices his glare of death or the way his hand keeps hovering by his gun - she seems nice and all, for an undead assassin with a great ass but if she makes _one single joke_ , Len is going to ice her - because she decides not to go that route.

"Guess that makes us avian daemon bros," she says instead, holding up her fist.

Len snorts. "Nice save."

"Aerderon's an albino canary," she says wryly, nodding to the daemon that perched on her shoulder. "I'm used to weird comments. I had to dye her black when we were going vigilante, did you know that?"

"Matches the theme," Len agrees, but sighs. "More than mine does."

Now, don't get Len wrong. He loves Lachesis to a ridiculous degree, and he wouldn't swap her for the world. But he's not going to lie, his life would've been a lot easier if she'd settled in any other shape.

Anything else.

_Anything_.

Anything but a _chicken_. 

A very fine chicken, mind you; she put other hens to shame with her glorious feathers and her sharp beak and equally sharp claws. Mistress of her domain, and winner of a surprising number of daemon fights by opponents that underestimated her. 

But - a _chicken_?

Mick, damn him, had a bear. Equally rare, perhaps, and no one, meaning _no one_ , fucked with someone whose daemon was a literal mama bear, but even Mick and his beloved Calliope couldn't make up for all the ground Len lost the second anyone recognized which daemon was his. 

Most people thought it was the other way around - him and Mick being so close and all, they could pull it off - and Mick was willing enough to fake it long enough for a job, but being stuck in this little tin can made the hiding moot. 

Better to brazen it out, Len supposes. 

She'd settled quickly, his Lachesis had; quicker than most, when Len had unexpectedly been forced to kill someone, his childhood coming to a sudden and ignomious end. Daemons were never wrong, but sometimes she seemed unhappy, discontent, with what she was, no matter how much Len assures her that he loves her just as she is, slight embarrassment aside.

Sometimes, she tells him, when she sleeps, she dreams of being something different.

Something more fierce. 

Something _bigger_.

Oh, well. What's done is done, after all, and Len refuses to be ashamed.

"That's odd," Rip says, when Len picks Lachesis up protectively; he instinctively reaches out for his hound, almost as if confirming that she's still there. "I would've thought history would've mentioned...well, never mind. I'm sure it will have no impact."

No impact other than everyone thinking Len's soft, that is. His Lachesis isn't even a layer, but no, everyone sees hen and assumes 'mother hen'. 

But it's fine. He can manage.

And then one thing leads to another, and bad things happen, and suddenly he's fighting Mick and Lachesis is fighting Calliope and this is just _unfair_ , all of it, and -

Mick (Kronos) stops, his fist dangling just above Len's face.

"...what?" Len asks, suspicious.

"Your chicken is kicking my bear's ass," Mick says flatly.

Len turns to look.

Calliope is curled in a ball to try to get away from Lachesis' vicious darting attacks. They've never fought before - Len and Mick too concerned for their daemons' well-beings to let it happen, even when they were most at odds - and this was, to be frank, not exactly the outcome either Len or Mick would’ve predicted.

Len can't help it.

He starts laughing.

A minute later, Mick joins in. 

The daemons calm down and curl up together, just the way they have for thirty years. 

"You should be bigger," Calliope mutters to Lachesis - not the first time she's said it.

"I know," Lachesis replies, laying her head down and watching their surroundings with a beady, suspicious eye. "I know."

Nothing to be done about it, though, and it's good that they have Ray's Saint Bernard at the Oculus, because nothing else would've enabled them to drag Mick's unconscious body and his daemon away.

Len stands at the end of it all, showing his bravery to the last, and his chicken stands her best defense before him, wings mantled up, beak out, claws sharp. She can’t do much, but what she can, she’ll do. 

"Oh, if I were bigger," she snarls, darting forward to peck uselessly at one of the Time Masters. "If only I were bigger...!"

And then the Oculus goes off.

Len doesn't die.

Len gets _thrown_.

Len lands hard, somewhere and somewhen, and it's only instinct that gets him rolling, keeps him from breaking all his bones and his neck to boot, but in rolling he rolls himself right off a goddamn cliff. 

And then he's falling - falling -

Caught.

He squints against the wind.

Is that a _pterodactyl_? He was caught by a _pterodactyl_?!

Wait.

He _knows_ this pterodactyl.

"Lenny!" she sings out, because it is a her, a her Len would know anywhere, no matter that she looks rather different from the last time he saw her. "Look! I figured out what I'm supposed to be!"

" _Lachesis_?" Len asks, less for confirmation and more just to express his surprise. "But - you settled!"

"The Oculus made me feel shifty again," she says. "And when we landed here, I saw them and I just _knew_ , you know?"

Len nods dumbly.

Really, he should've expected this. All those fancy scientists did keep saying that chickens were the descendants of dinosaurs...

"Watch me loop-de-loop!" Lachesis demands.

Len starts smiling. 

Calliope's gonna _love_ being the small spoon for once.


	5. coldwave tattoos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a belated birthday gift for mundocrayzer, per the idea suggested. hope you like it!

Len's never been a fan of tattoos. 

Oh, sure, he's as much of a prison bird as the next man over (the next man over typically being Mick), and he knows the assumptions. He knows how people speculate that his reluctance to disrobe actually means that he has a lot of them, possibly even a full Yakuza-esque shirt of them. 

That's silly, of course - what's the point of art if it's never displayed? Len just hates taking off his shirt, that's all. Doesn't like being vulnerable like that. 

Also, he's easily chilled. 

Pun intended.

But no, no tattoos for Len. It started as a matter of hygiene - Len was already well aware of the issues involved with dirty needles by the time he was thrown into prison for the first time, growing up as he did in the eighties - and after a certain point it almost turned into a matter of pride. Len was far too changeable to want something permanent on his skin - hadn't he learned at a young age that nothing in life is permanent, even love? - and the few times he'd ever been inclined to break his rule, he found all the offered designs to be gaudy and unaesthetic. 

By the time he'd realized that not all tattoos were like what tended to be offered to criminals - so much Christian symbolism, seriously, _so much_ , if Len sees one more badly disguised Virgin Mary he's gonna scream - he'd already gotten used to his excuse. 

Oh, sure, some of those geometric snowflake designs were pretty as hell, but Len hadn't spent a dozen years of his life loudly proclaiming that he couldn't get tats because he was Jewish and fighting the neo-Nazis over the fact just to drop the excuse _now_. 

So yeah. No tattoos, no problems. 

It'd never occurred to Len that he'd been thinking about it all wrong. 

Just because he's never let a needle loaded with ink near his skin doesn't mean that he doesn't have tattoos. 

He does. They're just on _Mick's_ skin, not his.

Mick's always liked tattoos, always saw them as something pretty to look at that couldn't be taken away from him; when Len asked him what he'd do if he didn't like the image anymore, Mick'd shrugged it off. 

Which made sense, actually; Mick is as constant and steadfast as his tattoos, no matter how much he compared himself to a roaring intemperate fire, and once his loyalty is given, it remains, and the remaining itself becomes a reason for loyalty.

Len would criticize, but he's had the advantage of that quirk of Mick's temperament for a long time, and he rather likes it that way.

But maybe Len's put a bit too much of himself into that comparison, thought about it too much, because when Mick gets burned and the charred and twisted scar tissue is all that remains of what was once colored flesh, Len feels the loss deep in his chest. 

It's a bad sign, that's what it is.

What's worse is that Mick _likes_ it.

He likes his scars, his burns; he boasts that the fire revealed his true self, that he's stronger now, more honest, less layered with falsities.

Len, who rather likes layers, can't help but look at that absence and see -

Well.

If Mick will give up on his tattoos, the ones he loved so dearly and so loyally for so long, the ones he put under his skin so that they couldn't be taken away from him, what does that mean about what he'll do about _Len_?

There was one tattoo, high up on Mick's arm, that Len particularly liked. It was one of those geometric snowflakes that he'd liked so much, soothing straight lines woven close enough to create the illusion of movement; Mick had seen Len lusting over them at the tattoo parlour they were using as a temporary hiding place after a heist, and less than a week later he'd gone straight back there and gotten one done, blues and blacks and greys. 

Len's preferred color palette. 

Oh, Len had bitten Mick's head off about it, of course, going back to the scene of the crime was against Len's little pack of rules, and pretty dumb to boot. But Mick laughed at the lecture, and given the way that Len liked to look at that design, liked petting the flesh of it where it was, tracing his fingers along those nice straight lines, he was probably right to. 

That tattoo, that was _Len's_. It was on Mick's skin, sure, but it belong to Len and Len saw that tattoo as meaning that he, in turn, belonged to Mick.

It was gone now, that tattoo. The scar tissue is too dense, too knotted, raised up flesh in pale white and pink. Maybe there’s a line in there, somewhere, but Len can’t see it if there is; the straight lines he loved to trace are gone for good. 

He doesn’t know what it means.

Does it change things?

Was this absence – somehow, unlike all the other absences they’d had from each other – enough to push them apart for good?

Is Mick _happy_ to have it gone? Was he better off that way? Does he feel less burdened without it?

Yes, Len knows he’s overthinking this. 

But he can’t help it.

He can’t help tracing out those lines in his mind. 

He can’t help wondering –

It gets better once they team up again, supervillains together, but worse once they go on the Waverider.

Len’s idea.

Stupid idea.

Ditching Mick and thinking he could come back in a week or two to pick him up might be their normal way to proceed, but it doesn’t work quite the same way with time travel. Mick’s out for revenge before Len's even finished ditching him, and he’s back within a week but also after what could very well be years.

Len’s fault.

The Time Masters got rid of Mick’s burns, too, when they got rid of the rest of it: thirty years of partnership, friendship and more besides, all gone now. Mick's skin is free and clear, now, like it hasn’t been since they first met and Mick was a kid, still drawing on himself with pens instead of ink. 

Len doesn’t know what to do about it.

When things are better – not good, but better – he says to the air near Mick’s head, “Gideon was able to fix my hand just the way it was.”

Mick grunts. It’s not really a reply as it is an acknowledgement that Len exists, which at this point Len will take as better than nothing. 

“Just like it was,” Len continues. “Gnawed off fingernail and all, just like it was when we first came on board.”

Mick grunts again. “Filthy habit,” he says, but he sounds thoughtful. “Always told you to stop with that.”

Len says nothing, and hopes that the hint made it through. It won’t bring his tattoo back, the healing process, but Gideon can recreate the burns Mick loved so much. 

Maybe that’ll make him happy.

Len doesn’t know if Mick ever takes him up on that suggestion.

He goes to the Oculus not knowing.

And when he returns, everyone is wary, at first, because apparently he’s not the first version of himself to come back, but once they confirm its him, they celebrate. 

Len celebrates, too, but not for the same reason as everyone else.

There’s liquor everywhere during his party, sloshing all over, and Mick, as usual, has managed to take the first excuse to shed a few layers of clothing.

Sheds his shirt faster than Kirk, Len used to joke, when they were together, and now he's back at it again, and the absence of it brings a sight that gladdens Len's heart like nothing else. 

Mick’s burns are back, all back the way they used to be –

\- except for one small patch of skin, right at the upper arm.

Where there’s a snowflake.


	6. coldwave/coldflashwave - restaurant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My Fucking Restaurant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See http://robininthelabyrinth.tumblr.com/post/167950066784/mewwitch-oneiriad-failnation-when-you
> 
> with thanks to oneiriad for help with the research

_Welcome to My Fucking Restaurant, a brand new restaurant featuring the works of gourmet chef Mick Rory. Formerly (mostly) an alleged supervillain in Central City, Chef Rory has turned his attention to his other passion: food and drink. My Fucking Restaurant, located in Keystone City, offers both an à la carte menu and a recommended multi course tasting menu experience based on Chef Rory’s unique life experiences, called “A Career”. Our restaurant appears from the entrance like a homey, neighborhood bar, but walk inside and you’ll be amazed by the clean, modernist – one might even say futurist – design, including an intriguing seating arrangement not unlike a Star Trek spaceship. _

_At our exclusive twelve seat restaurant, Chef Rory prepares the dishes right in front of your eyes and – as you might expect from someone with his reputation – almost every dish involves innovative uses of flame and heat. Prepare to be amazed as you come with us on a once-in-a-lifetime journey of flavor – and fire._

* * *

** The Career **

* * *

_Discovery –_  
Three treats: a macaroni-and-cheese ball, spiced with siracha and fried to perfection; a small square of fried mozzarella jazzed up with the addition of a twist of ricotta, lemon, and duck fat, accompanied by a homemade marinara dip; and a twist on jalapeno poppers, made with fresh jalapenos, zucchini blossoms, suffered with cream cheese and coated with panko.  
_a child’s first bite of his mother’s cooking, introducing a love of food_

 _Tragedy –_  
Three types of onion, each expertly sliced and stacked before being lit alight before your eyes. Underneath our version of the famous ‘onion volcano’, however, you will find a small spinach salad tossed in a pastis remoulade with garlic and a touch activated charcoal, warmed by the volcano as the onion slowly chars above it.  
_the familiar surroundings burn before your eyes and you can’t look away or call for help, represented by the familiar sight of the dish and the surprising nuance underneath_

 _Reawakening –_  
Venison heart, cured over a long time, shaved into thin scrapings and put under a bed of straw to burn down into ashes, which are served simply on a single plate. Beneath the layer of ash, discover a tangy celery root cream under which hides a secret bite of osteria caviar.  
_when your heart has burnt down into nothing but ash, underneath it all you meet a new friend, represented here by the combination of incredible cheesiness and saltiness at the same time_

 _The “Perfect Partnership”-_  
A dome made of dough tinted with squid ink, filled to the brim with all your favorite pizza toppings: pepperoni, tomatoes, garlic, and (upon request) pineapple, as well as several other secret ingredients that come together to create the perfect mini-pizza when the dome is sliced open and the cheese flows outward to fill the plate – impossible to catch or stop. Served with a side of fresh, crisp apple salad, tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette, and additional crostini to mop up any leftover cheese.  
_when the perfect pieces come together, nothing can stand in your way – no flavor can compare_

 _Rebirth –_  
A hearty beefsteak, cooked en flambe before the table, served with a sauce of its own juices, butter, shallots, cream, and a heavy helping of brandy – our version of the traditional Steak Diane.  
_in the heat of the fire, you find yourself born anew_

 _Reunion –_  
A royal couscous with a base of flambéed ptitm, incorporating special ingredients selected that day from the local farmers’ markets by the chef in person. Typically highly spicy (harissa, berbere, and ghost chili sauces make regular appearances).  
_you meet again, uncertain of how you will fit together, only to find that adding a little bit of spice can make an old relationship work like its brand new again_

 _Time –_  
A long slice of banana, served in a boat of aged Jamaican rum, dark brown sugar, butter, rum, cinnamon, and sugar cane, lit on fire as it travels from the skillet to your plate; an explosion of heat comes from the inclusion of a dark, bittersweet chili-chocolate ganache at the very center. The dark twists and turns of this version of bananas foster won’t be quickly forgotten – our legendary dish.  
_it takes almost no time at all for things to go wrong, but what you achieve in the meantime will shine for all eternity_

 _Rediscovery –_  
An olive oil ice cream, slick and subtle, served with cherries, orange zest, and a hint of pomegranate juice, topped with a dark red mixed-berry liqueur which is subsequently light on fire. A cherries jubilee like you’ve never tasted before.  
_there is no elation, no celebration, like finding something you thought was lost forever - when things are finally right with the world once more_

 _Completion –_  
A selection of flaming cocktail-inspired jelled spheres – take a bite of each one for the full feeling of each to explode in your mouth, served on a warm vanilla foam.  
Current list of cocktails include: the Flaming Margarita (sugar, salt, lime, rum, yuzu twist); Smoked (maker's mark, maple smoke, ac bitters, caster sugar, orange twist); Boom Goes the Dynamite (rooibos, vanilla, violet, ver jus, rum); Absinthe (absinthe, sugar); Bailey’s Comet (Irish cream, butterscotch schnapps, goldschlager, rum, cinnamon)  
_each ending is a beginning, each beginning an ending, and yet the world goes round - but you can face them all as long as you're together_

* * *

** SPECIAL TIME-LIMITED ADDITION: **

* * *

_The Triad –_  
Chef Rory’s spin on the Flaming Alaska, featuring a heart of frozen vanilla ice cream created from liquid nitrogen, surrounded by a loving layer of cake and meringue whipped at incredibly fast speeds, all of which is covered with a shot of dark rum and flambéed before your eyes with Chef Rory’s very own heat gun  
_Chef Rory is currently experimenting with this new addition to his ‘Career’ menu. The addition of the extremely quick elements to the existing hot and cold components is still very much in a new and tentative stage, so it may not end up working out. The menu will be updated accordingly._


	7. coldwave, Len remembers Doomworld

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: Hello! If you're taking prompts still, could you do a coldwave one? Where the mind eraser that mick used on Len didn't quite work, so he remembers but he only sees it in is dreams? So most- if not every- nights len wakes up screaming but Micks always there to comfort him which he doesn't understand cause he ~killed Mick~ and still doesn't understand it until Rip proposed them becoming legends and then it's so much clearer. (Which could lead to Len just refusing the legends idea completely?)

It’s dreams, at first. 

Len’s never had recurring dreams before, though, so this is new. They’re so vivid, so _clear_ – they’re not nearly as nonsensical as Len’s dreams usually are. They make linear sense, for one thing, instead of jumping around from one horror to another, or randomly introducing pineapples in the corner of every scene. 

He wakes up shouting at himself to stop.

Stop fighting, stop hurting, stop _killing Mick_.

They’ve fought plenty of times, aimed their guns at each other, but they’d never pull the trigger the way he sees himself doing, his face frozen in anger and hurt and betrayal. 

_Never_.

“You sure you’re okay?” Mick asks after the first few times.

Len shrugs it off.

“You’re not okay,” Mick says firmly after the tenth or twentieth time. Not even going up against the Flash with Lisa had helped, a casino break _and_ a grandiose battle just like he's always enjoyed, and usually there’s nothing like having both Mick and Lisa where Len can keep an eye on them – all his chicks in their nest, so to speak – to calm Len’s subconscious down. Didn't work this time, though, and Mick knows it just as well as Len. 

“I might have a problem,” Len confesses, and tells Mick the whole story. The weird dreams that started right after his first battle with the Flash - the linearity of them - the consistency of them - how much it felt like a memory, for all that he wakes up with Mick, alive and well, curled up by his side -

“Okay,” Mick says when Len's done. “That makes – exactly zero sense, but let’s get started working this out.”

“Working this out how?” Len asks doubtfully. “It’s just a dream. It's not _real_.”

“And most of my memories from before the age of ten are non-existent because I have trauma-related amnesia,” Mick points out. “Don’t see them anywhere but my dreams.”

“You’re _here_ , Mick,” Len points out in return. “I obviously didn’t kill you. Also, there were two of you. None of that makes any sense as anything _other_ than a dream.”

“You say it’s still fuzzy,” Mick says. “Let’s start by clearing things up. My shrink can recommend someone.”

“You want me to see a _shrink_?”

“No,” Mick says patiently. “I want you to see a hypnotist.”

“Wow, that’s a _terrible_ idea,” Len says. “We’re _not_ doing that.”

He dreams again that night of killing Mick, sees the ice freeze his partner’s heart, sees the blood spill out, thick and red, and that scene just repeats on endless loop again and again and again –

“Mick,” Len says, shaking his partner awake at four in the morning. 

“Wha…?”

“That hypnotist,” Len says. “Who’d you have in mind?”

"Well," Mick says. "I kinda only really know one that deals with supervillains..."

“Wow,” Poison Ivy, Mick's pen pal plant-buddy (weirdos, both of them), says about a week later, after Len's told her and her girlfriend the whole story from the start. “This is a terrible idea.”

“I know, right?” Len says gloomily. 

“I mean, I’m a shrink an' Ivy’s good with hypnotism, so I _guess_ we’re the best you’ve got?” Harley says, but she sounds very doubtful. “We ain't that good, though. But, like, we don’t want you to fall into Hugo Strange’s lap either, so...”

“You guys helped me clear up some old suppressed memories that were causing me some trouble not four months ago, following the fire,” Mick argues. “You do it all the time for the local girls, I know you do.”

“Those are suppressed _memories_ ,” Ivy stresses. “Not dreams.”

“Same difference.”

Harley opens her mouth, then closes it with an effort of will. And then a second later bursts out with, “Do you even _know_ how _wrong_ that is -?!”

"Shhh, it's okay, babe, relax," Ivy says soothingly to Harley. "Mick, stop it before she starts ranting about the DSM, okay?"

“Just do it before I chicken out,” Len interjects quickly, because Mick's looking mutinous and Harley's looking murderous and no one wants to get in the middle of that. “And we all know how Ivy feels about chicken.”

“Don’t mock the vegetarian about to entrance you,” Ivy says, rolling her eyes. “Okay, let’s do this thing.”

Len goes under.

When he resurfaces, he has a brand new shiny clear set of dreams (memories?), and they _still_ make zero sense. He tells them to everyone, and they puzzle over them together.

“Okay,” Harley says. “There’s one thing that might make this whole stupid sheebang make a lick of sense.”

“What’s that?”

“Bear with me - we start by assuming that time travel exists.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Why not?” she presses. “If Ivy can exist, if your Flash can exist, and all those metas – why not time travelers?”

“If there were time travelers, wouldn’t we have seen them?” Len points out. “They’d come back to famous events or something.”

“Well, maybe they can’t. Maybe there’s some sorta Time Police to keep 'em from interfering…”

“Even if there _is_ something like that, putting aside how distressing it is to imagine law enforcement getting its fingers into something as awesome as time travel, how’d Mick and I get caught up in it?” Len demands. 

“Boss,” Mick says. “If anyone offered you a chance to go time traveling, you’d leap at it.”

“Only for a year,” Len says.

Mick frowns. “Why?”

“Because then it’d be a _leap year_. Get it?”

Harley hits him with a pillow, cackling madly in approval, as the other two groan and put their heads in their hands. Len hadn’t even seen any pillows – either Harley secretly has access to a pocket of space-time, or it’d been hidden in the plants somewhere. In which case Len _really_ doesn't know. 

He’s pretty sure it’s the space-time pocket. 

“So what do we do?” Mick finally asks.

“Don’t go time traveling,” Ivy says immediately.

“But what if the consequences of us not going are worse than the consequences of us going?” Len asks. “I assume our past selves had a good reason.”

“Let’s focus on getting back the rest of your - you know what, let's just assume they're memories,” Ivy says firmly. “Maybe that’ll explain.”

A few hours later, Harley has _still_ not stopped saying “ _Damien Darhk_? And _Malcolm Merlyn_? What is this, the League of Shadows _rejects society_?”

“I’d feel offended, but the League would never try to recruit me,” Len says thoughtfully. “Also, thanks for finally explaining what the League of Shadows is; I’d been wondering. How do you even know about foreign ninjas?”

“Eh, Bats is pretty thorough,” Harley says with a shrug. “They either all pass through here or at least we hear about ‘em.”

“That still doesn’t stop us from figuring out how to stop this,” Len says.

“According to your memories, they recruited your past self – who’s an idiot, by the way – by telling him, believably, that you die in the future,” Ivy says, tapping her lips. “I think we have to assume that you actually _did_ die, but in a way that was necessary for some reason. That’s why Mick betrays you to his hero team -”

“I’m never joining a hero team,” Mick grumbles, not for the first time.

“- and why you’re so upset. You think he’s killing you, and you’re lashing out.”

“I still feel like it’s an overreaction,” Len objects. “We’d fight it out, not kill each other.”

“If it helps, I think that fuzzy bit of memory in the middle is Merlyn doing something to your brain,” Ivy offers. 

“He’s called ‘the Magician’,” Harley agrees. “Excellent with hypnotism. He’d totally fuck with you, make you more on their side than you outta be.”

“The future is bright,” Len says with a sigh. “We’ve seriously got to figure out a way to avert it.”

“Wish we could just ask ‘em what the deal is,” Harley agrees, also heaving a sigh.

Len pauses.

“Boss?” Mick asks.

“I’ve got a _really_ bad idea,” Len says.

The Waverider does, in fact, show up to stop them from burning down STAR Labs. 

“I don’t know how it happens,” the woman in white – Sara? – is saying as she walks down the platform. “Mick, you’re involved – what’s going on?”

“I don’t know!” Mick’s voice rings out. He's walking behind her - a few pounds heavier, a grumpy look on his face, but unmistakably Mick. 

The present Mick, who’s hiding with Len behind a curve of the building, starts in shock. Seeing is believing, Len guesses. 

“Well, figure out where those bombs are,” she says. 

“Sure,” future Mick snaps, and marches away from her – right to where they’re hiding.

The two Micks stare at each other.

“This is weird,” present Mick says.

“No kidding,” future Mick grunts. “Listen, last time I crossed paths with my past double, things went to shit. What’s going on? This didn’t happen the first time around.”

“We know what happened the last time that happened,” Len says. Future Mick starts – in just the same way present Mick just did – and looks at him, then doesn’t look at him, then looks conflicted and lost and awful. Len can’t help but reach out a hand to wrap around his arm, a comforting motion, like he always does, but it backfires – future Mick looks like he’s about to cry or something. “We just need more intel on what happens to _me_. So we can stop it.”

“You die,” future Mick says. “At the Oculus. Some sort of magic timeline-controlling device that the Time Pigs got their hands on, use to manipulate time. We were gonna destroy it, but someone needed to stay behind. You – you take my place and get blown up.”

“Why would you be there?”

“Stupidity?” future Mick suggests. “I really don't know, somedays, but it seemed worth it at the time. We saved the whole timeline from being fucked with by some pretty awful guys. They tortured me.”

“Are they dead now?” Len demands.

“Yeah, they all died in the explosion,” future Mick says. “Why are you…?”

“No, I have an idea,” Len says. “Now go disable those bombs while we make a getaway.”

“You’d better have an idea,” future Mick says. He looks desperate. 

Present Mick doesn’t look much better. 

“Leave it to me,” Len says.

Future Mick nods and goes to disable the bombs.

And then he goes back to the Waverider before Sara can get back.

“Gideon,” he says. “Is there a time anomaly remaining?”

“Yes, Mr. Rory,” Gideon says. “The burning of STAR Labs has been successfully averted, but another anomaly is forming, relating to one Leonard Snart and his –”

“Beta delta zed, baseline override,” Mick says. “Forget about the Snart anomaly. You don’t know about it, and if anyone asks, you deny it exists.”

“Understood, Mr. Rory,” Gideon says.

“Sorry, Gids.”

“I understand,” she says. “I don’t _appreciate_ it, but I understand.”

A day passes, though, and Mick doesn’t feel any different. He vaguely remembers the incident in question, remembers Len being all reassuring and shit, but nothing ever really came of it, and eventually he largely forgot about it. 

Another day.

A week.

The plan must not have worked.

And then they get called back to 2017, and there Len is, standing by the Flash’s side, and he’s smirking. “About time,” he drawls. 

“You _asshole_ ,” Mick says, understanding. “You didn’t _tell me the plan_?”

“Didn’t want to cause paradox!”

“I’m going to _punch you_!”

“Wait,” Jax says. “Is that our Snart? Back? For real?”

“I’m the one that went boom,” Len confirms. “Also the one who killed animal girl here – I’d apologize if I really cared – but I got over that years ago, and you should too.”

“How?” Rip demands.

“I remembered what happened in the past, and used it to shape the future,” Len says with a shrug.

“The device should have worked – you shouldn’t have remembered it as anything other than a dream!”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Mick snaps. “Or I would’ve told you that wouldn’t have worked. Snart has nightmares or dreams about pineapples and that’s _it_. Of _course_ we got suspicious when he started dreaming about evil dystopias and murder.”

“Pineapples?” Ray asks.

“Don’t ask,” Len says. 

“But even if he did retain the dreams, the memories wouldn’t have been anywhere near clear enough –” Rip starts.

“Yeah, about that,” Len says. “I promised Harley and Ivy a ride in the Waverider as recompense. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course we mind!” Sara exclaims.

“Awwww, that’s no fun,” Ivy purrs, coming out of the door in her usual state of undress-masquerading-as-a-costume, Harley a few feet behind her in what appeared to be three pieces of black-and-red leather barely stitched together - Mick has _really_ got to have a word with her about her costume choices. He and Len share a look of total agreement on the subject. 

“I’ve changed my mind,” Sara says, staring. “We don’t mind. At all. _Hiya_ , girls.”

Ivy blows her a kiss.

All the people even slightly attracted to women in the room that haven’t been inoculated – which is to say, everyone but Harley, Mick, and Len, because there's straight and there's gay and then there's Ivy-resistant and just about no one is Ivy-resistant – promptly go all glazed-eyed. 

Interestingly enough, this category includes both Amaya and Iris. 

“Yeah,” Len says. “This is gonna be fine.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me the plan,” Mick grumbles.

“Oh, get over it,” Len says, sliding a hand around Mick’s waist. No one’s going to notice their public display of affection with Ivy and her pheromones in the room. “At least I’m alive, and no more nightmares of murdering you.”

“No?”

“Nope,” Len says. “I’m back to pineapples.”

“One day, you’re going to explain that,” Harley tells him.

“It’s going with me to my _grave_ ,” Len says.

“Not anytime soon, it’s not,” Mick says. “You’re staying right here where and when I can keep an eye on you, you hear me?!”


	8. coldwave, not-a-dark-AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: Coldwave au idea: Lens life is better (dad is dead, mom stayed, etc) micks life worse. Their 1st meeting isnt big event for Len now but Mick is obsessed. Stalks him for right moment to have Len forever. Nabs Len. Makes Len his. Dark happy ending

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry, anon. I promise I will write you something nice and dark at some point. But I tried three times and every time I tried, it got fluffier and fluffier and fluffier until you have what you see below.

Lewis Snart is a corrupt cop with a sideline in Family work.

He's also an incompetent thief, relying on suggestions from his nine year old son to fix his plans, but he refuses to admit such a thing. And so it is, when Len unexpectedly falls sick with a flu that robs him of his voice, he shrugs and does without.

He fails.

The Families have no patience for failure.

Lewis Snart is gunned down in his own house, before the horrified eyes of his son and his infant daughter.

Len's foster home - both his and Lisa's, a kind-hearted couple who fell for her golden curls and couldn't bring themselves to tear her away from her sobbing elder brother - makes him get _so much therapy_.

That's probably what makes him decide to become a shrink, really.

And that, in turn, is what leads to - 

Well.

Everything else.

* * *

"- and that's why I need your help," Len concludes.

The woman in front of him looks utterly bewildered. Len's not sure why; he thought he'd been perfectly clear. 

"Should I start again?" he offers.

"Please do, mister," she says, raising a hand up and pinching the bridge of her nose. "No, wait a sec. I gotta few preliminary questions, stating off with how'd you find out where me and Ivy were hanging out, anyways?"

"Really good fertilizer has a higher toxicity rate than normal soil,” Len explains. “I got the last two geological surveys, which Gotham gets with startling regularity; this was the only place that changed. Next question?"

"So that's how Bats keeps finding us," she mutters crossly. "Damnit, Ivy."

"Maybe if you suggested she start a few new gardens each time instead of focusing on just one?"

"She doesn't want to leave her 'babies' alone for that long. Second question: what in hell made you think that finding _me_ ta ask for help was a good idea?"

Len blinks at her. "Why not? I have a problem and I need assistance from a colleague, and - as I said - you have the most expertise in -"

"I'm _Harley Quinn_ , sweetie," she interrupts. "I'm a _supervillain_."

"What, and you stopped having your PhD as a result?"

"I'm pretty sure I've had my license revoked," she says helplessly.

"Don't mean you got a _lobotomy_ and _forgot it all_."

"Fair enough," Harley says, clearly giving up on convincing him. "So, yeah, start again, I wasn't listening on account of thinking you was nuts. What's your issue again? And why am I the best person to help you?"

"Okay," Len says. He wouldn't be as good a shrink as he is if he wasn't patient and willing to go over things multiple times. "I'm a licensed psychiatrist specializing in severe disorders among the criminal population -"

"Same as I was," Harley agrees.

"Yeah, and also like you, I specialize in self-identified supervillains."

" _Tell_ me you didn't get a job at Arkham!" she exclaims, horrified.

"Oh, no, nothing like that," Len assures her. "I work in Central City."

"I guess that's better..."

"Debatable. At least Gotham _has_ an asylum, even if it is Arkham. We just have Iron Heights regular wing and Iron Heights supervillain wing. Not ideal for therapy, even once they're out."

"Out?"

"Iron Heights is something of a revolving door," Len says. "Again, much like Arkham, but more urgent in the exit strategies. Honestly, in my view, it's all for the best that they get out; most of my patients are definitely _not_ being helped by confinement in a frankly abusive situation by people who don't understand their particular needs -"

"No kidding," Harley replies enthusiastically. "Even Arkham doesn't care, it's more about tryin' ta keep 'em from society than it is about actually taking _care_ of 'em and trying to make 'em _better_ -"

"Exactly," Len exclaims, nodding. He _knew_ she’d understand. "The interaction of the superhero culture with the particular neuroses of these individuals results in -"

"- an entirely new pathology, necessitating by definition a different form of treatment -"

"This is why I came to you," Len says, pleased. 

Harley paused, flushing a little. "Well, I guess I do still take somethin' of an interest. So you treat supervillains?"

"I actually have a rather unorthodox approach," Len says. "Central City supervillains are often using their supervillainy to work through deep-seated issues - one is dealing with the loss of a younger brother he built much of his identity around, another is a clinical narcissist, yet another is a diagnosed pyromaniac with anxiety issues..."

"Yeah? You getting anywhere with 'em?"

"Actually, yes. In contrast to the traditional approach, which emphasizes care in a clinical setting - one that many of them reject rather, uh, _forcefully_ due to various traumas in their pasts - I've taken an alternative approach of working on their issues in their own setting."

Harley pauses mid-nod. "I know that's a pretty common technique for patients in regular treatment, mixing with them in their own environments and whatnot," she says cautiously. "But for these guys - ain't their own setting _supervillainy_?"

"It is," Len says steadily. 

Harley holds out a little longer, but he doesn't elaborate. 

"Okay, I'll bite," she says. "How're you treatin' 'em?"

"They've created identities as supervillains, and they want to be recognized _as_ supervillains," Len explains. "It’s important to them. They form entire coping rituals around it. So I meet with them on their own level, acknowledging and respecting them as supervillains."

"Won't that require, uh, you being a super, too?"

Len shrugs. "I explained my approach to the Flash - he's our local cape - and he's real reasonable about it. We staged a few fights, couple of thefts -"

"Wait. You're a _supervillain_?!"

"Technically I'm just engaging in a police-approved therapeutic roleplay with -"

"What's your name? Have I heard of ya? Tell me I've heard of you!"

"I mean, it's possible -"

"Alias, now! I'm tired of being the only shrink supervillain."

"Captain Cold."

"Holy crap, I _have_ heard of ya! You're the - oh, man, the Rogues! The Rogues are your _patients_?"

Len nods.

"How?!"

"I 'rescued' them from prison. Technically, I'm acting as a guarantee for their parole officers -"

"And ya keep 'em from killing anyone."

"Exactly. And I work with 'em in the meantime. I've made a lot of progress - Pied Piper is actually transitioning to working with the heroes on a regular basis, he's actually dating a cop now and he's dealing with his internalized self-hatred in a much healthier way -"

"Nice," Harley says, offering her hand for a high-five. "That's much better; if Ivy or Ozzie asks what I was doing, I can just say supervillain meet-up."

Len frowns. "Are they restricting your access to non-supervillain acquaintances?"

"No, no, nothing like that! We're just dealing with a small infestation of Owls - don't worry about it; you don’t want to get involved in Gotham’s shit. No one does. Anyway. Tell me about the problem."

"It's not really - he's not - it's not a _problem_ , really."

Harley's eyebrows go up pointedly and she leans back in her chair, crossing her arms.

"Mick Rory," Len confesses. "Heatwave, our pyromaniac - diagnosed, as I mentioned, and working with a traditional shrink as well as with me. He's working real hard on getting better, but it’s tough – it’s a long-standing issue. He’s had the pyromania and anxiety since childhood, and then his parents died in a fire and he got blamed, and then things went downhill from there, so you can imagine the rest."

Harley nods. “Sounds knotty,” she agrees. 

“He’s making plenty of progress, though,” Len assures her.

"So what's the problem?"

"He's – well. He’s developed something of a crush on me," Len admits.

"Ooooh boy."

"No, it's - it's not like that. It’s _cute_. He tries to stalk me sometimes."

"Stalking ain't cute, buddy. Trust me."

"No, no, nothing like that. It’s, like, he hides behind lampposts. He pretends to be reading a newspaper, like that hides his face at all. Stuff like that, it's absurd. And if I ever tell him not to follow me, he doesn't."

"So you _haven't_ asked him to knock it off generally?"

Len hesitates.

"Yep, that's what I thought," she says. "So lemme stop you right where you are: _no_. Don’t do it. Falling for a patient isn't just ethically wrong, it's - well. It's a bad idea. _Trust me_."

"That's why I came to you, actually," Len says. "You being the ultimate expert in HQS and all."

"HQS?"

Len coughs.

"...tell me that don't stand for Harley Quinn Syndrome."

"If you don't want me to tell you, I won't. Won't change it, though."

"Oh _jeez_. I can't believe it. You know, when I wished on my twenty-first birthday candle to go down in the history books, I ought've been more specific."

Len shrugs sympathetically.

"So what do you need advice in? How not to fall for your patient?"

"That," Len says grimly, "or else I'm gonna need to give you a referral so that he won't be _my_ patient anymore."

"Oh, sweetie," Harley says. "You've got it _bad_."

* * *

"Harls?" Mick says into his phone. "You got a minute?"

"For you, sweetie, definitely," she says. There’s the ripping sound of duct tape and the yelling in the background turns into muffled shouting. “What’s up?”

"I don't wanna bug you if you're doing something else..."

"Nah, no business or nothing. Spa day with the Sirens, fucking up some bad guys, but the girls have got it covered. Talk to me, baby. You sound upset."

"I think I've done it again," Mick says sadly.

"Gonna have to be more specific, sparky. Lit a serious fire? Went mano-a-mano with the Flash? Decided to blow up a building?"

"I kidnapped Len and moved him into my basement so we could be together forever."

"Mick!"

"I left the door open, though," Mick says earnestly. "I didn't want him feeling confined or nothing."

Harley face-palms. Mick can hear it. "Well, that's something," she says. "You know he loves you, right?”

“I know he thinks he does…”

“That's just your anxiety talkin'. He’s dating you because he _wants_ to be with you. S’why he referred you ta me. Tell me, did you at least leave him the key, too?"

"What key?" 

"...didn't you lock him up?"

"No! You know how Len feels about being stuck and unable to get out of places."

"So you kidnapped him, took him to your basement, and...left him there with the door open and not tied up?"

"I made him dinner, too?"

"…you know what? I'm gonna call this progress. Now, I need you to go sit down and write about what your day was like so we can try to identify what led you to this decision..."


	9. mick/iris, chilling together in a post-apocalyptic au

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr prompt: Now I just need post kronos Mick and Iris to just chill and bitch together and have many lazy cuddles (And maybe lazy sex) just them taking care of each other

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This went in a direction I wasn't expecting.

The armor of the Time Masters' bounty hunters is tough and heavy and creaky, but it doesn't impair motion and it is virtually impenetrable, and that's what's important.

Equally important, though, is that it's recognizable. The Time Masters may be gone, murdered at the hands of one of their own prodigals - Kronos, the youngest, who freed the Titans from the grip of their oppressive progenitors - but the sight of their bounty hunters still strikes fear into the hearts of the developed universe.

Indeed, the people standing in the hallway of the space station quickly scatter at the sight of the brown-and-grey armor and the tattered cape, some pretending they abruptly remembered somewhere else to be, others forgoing that pretense and just turning tail and running.

Good. 

After that last battle, civilians are far too annoying to deal with. The Dominators' alliance with the forces of Apokalips was a living nightmare for everyone in this portion of space-time, and the constant incursions by their advance scouts have become increasingly more clever.

Luckily, this is the last hallway before the blessed silence of the warrior's quarters. No civilians here.

Sure, it takes four different passwords in four different doors to get through all the traps set to deter uninvited visitors, but the security is worth it.

Especially when the door opens and it turns out the bed isn't empty.

The figure in the bed stirs and yawns. "Welcome back," her lover says roughly.

She drinks in the sight of him, her helmet helpfully providing statistics on him: his heartbeat is slow, calm; his blood pressure tells of a recent injury but nothing too bad; his temporal signatures indicates he has returned to this time within the last few hours. 

"I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow," she tells him, her voice tart. "Has Kronos returned empty-handed?"

Her lover snorts in amusement. "Caught him early," he says - Kronos, inadvertent leader of Earth's Defense Satellite, the savior of the Titans, he who freed the timeline from the Time Masters' authoritarian grasp.

Mick Rory, Heatwave, supervillain.

Hers. 

"Of course you did," she says, unable to keep from smiling. 

"And you?" he asks with a smirk in return. "Did my Mnemosyne return empty-handed?"

"Oh, yes," she says. "Empty-handed - because there's nothing left of them. Now, move over and let me in, Mick."

Mick snorts. "Sure, doll."

She reaches up and unclasps her helmet, shaking her black hair loose, revealing her smile. "One day I'll get you to call me Iris."

"I barely even call _Iapetus_ by his name anymore," Mick points out even as he does move over to make space for her. "And I've known him a hell of a lot longer than you."

"Yes," Iris says. "That's the only reason I'm not jealous." She pauses, considers. "Well, that, and his expression when you call him Lenny. I've never met someone more pleased about getting a new nickname."

Mick grins and pushes the blankets aside for her. "Get your kit off and get in bed. I'm due to be off duty all day." 

Iris feels her smile broaden. "You know, I was _wondering_ why Hyperion offered to swap shifts. That means that he's got Iapetus all to himself." Her voice is fond, the way it always is when it comes to Barry.

It had taken a long time to break herself of the habit of calling him Barry in front of other people, long enough that she'd decided quixotically that she wanted to use everyone's personal names when they were alone, but time is one thing the Titans had in abundance. 

At least, they do now. 

When the first attacks on Earth had come, they had been devastating. Heart-breaking. Iris' hands had been stained red that browned into black with the blood of her loved ones - Joe, Wally, Cisco, Camille, Linda, Caitlin...

Iris had demanded that Barry fix it, but he couldn't. He could run into the past, but he had no way of stopping the attacks. Even with a second shot, there was no way to stop the inexorable wave of violence. 

Hope had been lost until the Waverider came.

No, not the Waverider.

Sara had refused to alter the timeline for what she called 'personal reasons', too nervous about the side effect such major changes - the lessons of the Time Masters, the Time Bureau, and Rip Hunter too firmly imposed on her brain. 

Iris had slapped her. Barry had had to break them up.

Mick, though - Mick came to Iris, after, and he'd offered her more than she'd ever thought she could have. A time ship of his own, an opportunity to change time, even armor of her own, stripped from someone who would soon be a corpse, so that she could travel through the timeline as a feared figure, safe behind her mask and his training. 

And all he wanted was help saving a life of his own.

Barry and Iris signed up in a heartbeat.

They'd raided the Vanishing Point, Mick showing them where the Titans kept their armor, and they'd rescued Len.

Not just Len - a few of the Titans had heard Mick's warning and decided to defect with him. Koios came, the eternal questioner, and Themis, too, the warrior of justice that had been stolen from Thermysica well before her rightful time. Tethys and Oceanus both came, the eldest of the Titans, and - more importantly - the trainers. They refined what Mick taught Barry and Iris and eventually Len, and they made them what they are now.

Warriors, in defense of a world that both fears and reveres them.

Together, they created the Defense Satellite and they fought off the first wave of attacks and now they keep watch on the planet's defenses until the day comes that they can eradicate this threat once and for all. 

That day will come soon enough. 

In the meantime, Iris is content to take the occasional day off to curl in bed with her lover.

(It just sort of happened, really. She'd been so angry, so consumed, burning from the inside; she couldn't pour her soul out to Barry, who loved her with the endless faith of a child first finding love, so she'd ended up somehow with Mick. Mick had understood. It had developed from there - it was nothing like she'd had before, her high school boyfriends, her college girlfriends, Eddie, Barry, but it worked for her. She'd been guilty right up until the moment Mick had pointed out that Len and Barry had been getting their own version of _close_ , at which point she'd talked with Barry and they'd formed a mutual agreement and encouragement society. It worked for them right now, even if the door was still firmly propped open for them to return to each other's arms when things calmed down.)

Iris pulls off her armor and hangs it up for the automatic cleaner. She would never neglect her armor, no matter how much the bed calls, and Mick doesn't push her.

That done, she crawls in beside him.

"You're warm," she says, as pleased by it as she was the very first time. 

Mick pulls her into his arms. "And you're soft." He runs his cheek against her hair. He likes doing that; he has relatively little feeling in his burns, so he likes a diverse set of sensations where he can feel it. "You wanna sleep?"

Iris considers it. Mick had been napping, before, and he was still tired from his longer mission; he had more experience with solo missions through the timeline and got the harder jobs as a consequence. She was a bit tired herself, too; her own jobs were not easy. Protecting the world rarely was.

Mick wouldn't object to just holding her. But he's definitely not wearing anything under the blankets, and - armor and underarmor removed - neither is she.

And it _has_ been a while...

Iris smiles wickedly, letting her thoughts show. "Not _that_ tired."

Mick hums happily and leans down to brush his dry lips against her neck.

Iris shivers happily. Mick's been trading tips with Barry again.

Mick's hands are gentle, despite what she thought the first time they came together, but he's not afraid to play rough when she pushes for it. There's a lot of ways to stroke a fire, as he likes to say.

He's also open to other forms of play that Iris has decided she rather likes.

Iris rolls them both over, pushing him down onto his back and crawling on top of him.

"How long did you say until you had until your next shift?" she purrs.

He grins. "Long enough," he says, and runs his hands up her sides.

She takes them and firmly places them above his head by the headboard, which he obediently grips and keeps in place.

"Good," she tells him, and watches as his eyes brighten. No matter how long it's been, she loves seeing it - it's all the affirmation she needs. "In that case, I'll take my time."


	10. digger/sam, locked in together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My half of an art-fic trade for @waterwindow, who wanted comics-based!Digger Harkness/Sam Scudder

"I can't believe Cold locked us in this stupid room," Sam grumbles.

"I can't believe that he was right that we wouldn't leave till we finished the snacks," Digger replies, reaching out to snatch another bag of chips from the pile Cold had left behind. 

Sam makes a face in agreement, looking down at the beer he had in one hand and the pretzels in the other. "I could get out of here anytime, you know," he says, because it's important to establish that he's here voluntarily. Even if it's only voluntarily because he's a sucker for a particular brand of pretzels and somehow Cold knows it. "With my mirrors -"

"Yeah, yeah, and I could bust the door lock with my boomerangs," Digger says, waving a hand. "And still: here we both are, innit true?"

"Maybe I think the man's got a point, Cap'n," Sam protests mildly, taking another swing of his beer. This is a blatant lie to save face, and Digger knows it, and worse, he knows that Digger knows it. Digger's not wrong in that they could both leave whenever they really wanted, but damnit, Cold did plan this out really well: he's got his favorite armchair, some beer and his favorite snacks. It's a pretty good inducement to stick around. Even if it does mean Cold was right about his plan to keep them in here, which gets Sam's goat a bit. Whatever, he'll figure out some way to take revenge later. "I mean, he only shoved us in here so we'd figure out how to combine our styles better, my mirrors, your boomerangs. It ain't necessarily a _bad_ idea."

"We _already_ combine our styles," Digger says. "S'why we're the Rogues, yeah? I go in with my boomerangs, you lot get in my way -"

"You mean you get in _my_ way."

"Hah! Don't be ridiculous, Scuds. You're too _reflexive_ to get anywhere."

"Uh-huh. And what about you? You always end up right where you started - ain't that your thing?"

"I do it on purpose," Digger says with great dignity, which would work except for the way his turquoise hat flops over his bright red hair when he slouches further down and shoves another handful of chips in his mouth.

"Can't see how doing it on purpose helps you much," Sam drawls, "given that where you started out - and end up - is usually _prison_."

"You say that like _you_ had any successes before we all joined up."

"Says the man's big idea was to try to boomerang the Flasher to the moon and back," Sam says snippily. "At least _I_ managed to shrink him to the size of a mouse -"

"He grew back, didn't he?"

"Well, yeah, but it still _worked_."

"Didn't he catch you the first time by _turning off the lights_?"

Sam huffs. If he wasn't so comfortable, he'd make something of Digger's little jabs. But as it is... "We _have_ gotten more successes by working together, though."

"True," Digger concedes. He hasn't gotten up either, and his fingers are colored orange from that awful Aussie chips brand he can't get enough of; he won't start a real fight until he's had a chance to lick them clean. "But I don't see why we've got to _practice_ it or nothing. Too much like work. Besides, you know your thing, I know mine..."

"It's like the United States," Sam says thoughtfully. "We've all got our different strengths, like the different states, and we _could_ fight separately but together, but we're bound to be even stronger if we combine them into one attack instead of a bunch of different ones that the Flasher can take down one at a time. You know what I mean?"

"Nah, mate," Digger replies, deliberately exaggerating his Australian accent. "I ain't got no idea what you're on about, mate."

"Oh come off it," Sam says. "You've been out of the bush for years. You're as Central City as the rest of us."

"No one's as Central City as Cold."

Sam shrugs. It's probably true. He's pretty sure Cold spends his rare vacations away from the city pining for it. 

Digger snorts, which either means Sam said that out loud or that Digger's thoughts have been going the same way. That is something Sam appreciates about Digger - they've got the same instincts, the same innate style.

Maybe that bullcrap he just blathered about figuring out how to work together better more really wasn't a bad idea. 

"You could always shove a mirror onto one of my boomerangs," Digger offers, starting to lick the chip dust off his fingers. "We've done that before."

"Yeah," Sam agrees, slouching down further in his own chair to think. "It's sometimes hard to get an angle when just part of the boomerang's a mirror, though - can't you just use a boomerang made entirely of glass? I know you've done that a few times."

"And nearly cut my fingers to ribbons every time," Digger snorts. "The fact that I _can_ doesn't mean I _want_ to."

"I could work up one of my light generators into the boomerang instead," Sam offers. "And set the mirrors in place in advance, so that when you throw, it activates the mirrors."

"That might work," Digger says. "But what'll it do? Another hologram? Flasher's gotten wise to that; he's just started running though 'em."

"So we'll make a hologram of a door where there isn't one or something."

"Hah!" Digger exclaims. "And then he runs straight into it and bam! Just like Wile E. Coyote."

"Except for once it's the roadrunner getting bashed," Sam agrees, smirking at the mental image. 

"Could be this work-together-on-plans crap idea's got something to it after all," Digger says. "I'm still going to tar and feather Cold's bed and tell him Heatwave did it."

Sam snorts. "Count me in on that."

They clink their beers together in agreement, then relax in silence for a few minutes, mulling the idea over.

"Maybe we could do something with some sort of portable light trap," Sam suggests. "Y'know, the way I set up with my mirrors, except attach 'em all to your lightning-fast boomerangs. That way we could catch the Flasher in mid-stride."

"Heh. That might _trip_ him up."

"Not to mention _bend_ him to our will."

"I like that one," Digger says admiringly. "Works for both of us. Say, do you still have that hypnosis glass? That stuff was great."

"You only say that 'cause you pulled a trick on _me_ with them," Sam grumbles. Stupid Gotham. No one ever had any luck in Gotham. 

"Nah! It was just cool. If we used it on a whole bunch of people in advance - maybe through my boomerangs going through a crowd - we could get 'em all in on attacking Flasher when he arrives."

Sam can't help but start to grin. "Digger," he drawls. "Are you suggesting that we attack the Flash with - _a flash mob_?"

Digger bursts out laughing. "Yeah," he says, still sniggering. "Guess I am."

Sam isn't much better. Maybe he's had too many of these beers - he wouldn't put it past Cold to spike them with something stronger, and given the taste and general quality of them, he's not sure he'd notice if they had been - but it's the funniest idea he's ever heard.

"We'll have to find a good job to do that with," he decides. 

"You bet," Digger agrees enthusiastically. "I bet if we put our heads together, we can come up with some more really great ones like that."

"But not here," Sam decides, putting down the beer and looking suspiciously at the food. Sure, it all _looks_ vacuum-sealed, but who knew where this general feeling of bonhomie came from? Even if it _was_ with Digger, who he liked rather a bit more than the rest of the Rogues. 

_Quite_ a bit more, if the last few times they'd ended up in bed together stood for anything...huh. Maybe that's what Cold had been getting at, putting them in a room together? Some sort of matchmaker gig? It's been a while since they’d shacked up, and they’d both been getting kind of pissy around each other recently.

…nah.

"Where, then?" Digger asks.

"A bar," Sam decides, pulling out a pocket mirror to bust open the lock Cold had put on the door. 

"Best idea you've had all night," Digger exclaims. "Let's go get pissed."

"No sooner said than done," Sam says, kicking open the door. "Let's go."

The first bar was great. As was the second one they visited after they got thrown out of the first one on account of getting a bit too rowdy with the other customers. 

It took Digger until the third bar to start ragging on about Sam's color scheme the way he always did when he was particularly snozzled.

"Orange!" he groans. "And it's such a _crap_ shade of orange, too -"

"I didn't pick it for the colors," Sam says, then smirks. He's pretty drunk, too. "Though I must say I look fine as hell in orange. Not everyone can pull that color off and still look good."

"It's _prison_ orange, is what it is," Digger grumbles. "Gives me bad associations."

"Bad associations, huh? That's how you always end up in my bed, is it?"

"Usually _my_ bed, y’mean," Digger shoots back, drunk enough for his usual paranoia over being queer to dissipate. "You're too damn prissy to want to worry about a wet spot in yours."

Still drunk enough to be bitchy, though. 

Sadly, Sam finds Digger at his most bitchy weirdly attractive. 

Clearly he's taken one too many hits to the head from the Flash. 

"All right," Sam says agreeably. "I'm easy. Your bed, then. Tell me, is it the orange that lures you in?"

"No!"

Sam sniggers. 

"And don't go saying you're easy," Digger continues, throwing an arm over his shoulders. "You're pretty hard to pull, you know that? Been trying for weeks."

"You mean _I've_ been trying for weeks!" Sam exclaims. " _You've_ been avoiding _me_." 

"Have not."

"Have _so_."

"Have - whatever. Want to blow this joint?"

"Literally?" Sam asks, blinking at the bartender. There's two of him. Kind of like Multiple Man. Or maybe Sam's drunker than he thought. "Dunno, didn't think they were _that_ bad."

Digger gives it serious consideration. "Nah," he finally says. "S'a good bar."

He reaches over and pats the bar the way one would a friendly dog. 

Sam shakes his head. "Let's go home," he suggests.

"I thought you'd never ask," Digger replies. "Also, you totally missed a chance to make a 'hard' pun."

"Maybe I was saving it."

"Yeah, I _bet_ you were."

"I'll have you know my skills extend pretty far on the light spectrum," Sam says. "Including my mastery of _hard light_."

Digger snorts. "And I'm a master of _handling a stick_. You wanna get out of here and have me to throw yours?"

"Not literally."

"No, not _literally_ , you little -"

"Home sounds good," Sam says, lurching to his feet. 

"Yeah," Digger says. "Sure does."

They even find time to steal some tar for Cold's bed on the way.


	11. Would You Ship - Len/Mick/Leo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So I did a bunch of meme fills for two different style of memes and now I'm transferring them all to Ao3. Expect a giant flood of new chapters all at once.
> 
> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Would you ship this? Len/Mick/Leo - functioning ot3 where Leo came back to Earth 1 after he and Ray broke up. Figured he should return this doppleganger he found. He figured Mick was missing him. (I feel like this became a prompt halfway through?)**

I’m actually writing an AU twin!Len&Leo and I haven’t decided if it’s going to end up being Len/Mick/Leo or Len/Mick and Leo/Ray yet

but that’s not what you asked :) Answer: Yes. Would definitely ship. 

As for the ‘how’: 

The situation on Earth-X turns really bad, with the Nazis essentially deciding that if they can’t rule the world, they don’t want anyone else to, either, and pulling the trigger on all the mutually assured destruction situations. Nukes are going off. Chemical and biological weapons used on an unprecedented scale. Mass attacks. Mass executions. These _are_ Nazis, after all, and as long as they have their little barricaded and quarantined paradise islands, what the hell do they care about the rest of the world?

Of course, it doesn’t work that way. The Resistance fights back whenever possible, but they can’t stop all of the atrocities, no matter what they do; it just gets worse and worse as people sell each other out for the merest chance to survive. 

They come up with a plan.

Or rather, they come up with two plans: one, the “Ark”, involves them gathering up as many people as they can into a gigantic fleet, ships and tanks and trucks and even just people on foot, and driving all of these people through a series of portals (created by Cisco’s vibe powers and tech) to get their refugees onto Earth 1 en masse. This is the worst plan they’ve ever had to do, to give up their whole world like this, but they’ve already lost their homes to radiation, disease, and worse; what’s it matter if they have to start again on a new earth if it means they survive? Central City is in the Midwest, luckily, and there’s a lot of empty space out there that they could fill up. 

But the problem is, they’re not the only ones with Cisco’s tech - whether through betrayal or carelessness or bad luck and torture, the Nazis have access to it, too. And that means that if they flee, the Nazis will follow them.

That leads to plan number 2: “Red Death”. Based on that (in the Nazi world) highly obscure little story by Edgar Allen Poe, it involves a group of volunteers going on a suicide mission to all of those little paradise islands that the Nazis have kept for themselves. They’ll bring disease, radiation, bombs, _death_ \- and, just to be absolutely sure no one escapes, they’ll bring beacons to summon the Dominators.

Leo is assigned to lead the Ark. Ray, over Leo’s strong protests, volunteers for the Red Death. 

Leo returns to Earth 1 absolutely crushed. He buries himself in his work, setting up a new series of towns to settle his refugees (a much smaller number than he would have liked - he can’t believe his world’s surviving population is this small) and doing his best, but when that’s done and everyone has a house and everyone has a job, well, he’s still a wreck. 

So he goes back to the only foundation he has in this world: Mick. 

Except when he knocks on Mick’s door, the person who opens it has his face, his features, but instead of having his eyes, he has eyes of extremely pale blue - so intense it almost looks like they’re glowing neon bright. 

“Oh,” Leo says. “You - you must be Mickey’s - I mean, Mick’s - you must be Len.”

Len stares at his doppelganger, of whom he’s heard so much, for a long moment. “Yeah,” he says. “Came back from the dead. You wanna come in? The game’s on.”

“I don’t like football,” Leo objects.

“Good,” Len says. “Because the relevant game is hockey, and you’re gonna love it.”

Leo lets himself be pulled inside.

It turns out he does like hockey. 

He also, much to his surprise, rather likes Len, and really, they’re both very rational people with similar temperaments (aka drama queens with a strong streak of vanity and an interesting set of kinks): is it any surprise that they’ve already worked out a good sharing system by the time Mick gets back from his run to the store to get beer?

(It takes a long time for it to become serious romantically as well as being very fun sexually, but Leo does eventually manage to overcome his trauma and settle down with his new boyfriends. Even if they do keep stealing stuff all. the. damn. time.)


	12. Would You Ship - Constantine/Len/Mick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Would you ship John Constantine/Leonard Snart/ Mick Rory - accidental marriage?**

Answer: Yes. Definitely yes.

How: Oh, for this one, we’re definitely going to have to go with “magical binding ritual gone wrong because someone didn’t take the time to fully read the fine print JOHN CONSTANTINE despite knowing better by now” to get them to the accidental marriage part.

It’s probably to save John’s soul or something. 

Mick is almost expecting something like this to happen (he’s familiar with the way things happen around John) and honestly John isn't all that surprised (it’s not the first time it’s happened), but what John IS surprised about is the fact that when they stumble out of the magical ritual which is loudly declaring them married, there are THREE people in the circle where there were originally only two.

Upon investigation, it turns out that Mick was being a very naughty bigamist and his original wedding vows included a requirement that any binding relationship with a third party would by necessity involve his original spouse and also (oops) that the original marriage contract was _another_ magic binding ritual that (also oops) did not include a “till death do us part” clause. So to fulfill the new spell while maintaining the old one, the universe just throws Leonard Snart back into the mix, pulling him from split seconds before the Oculus burst in his face. 

Mick is very pleased with this.

Len is - mostly bemused, and then pissed off that it took him multiple years to come back.

John is wondering what wonderful bit of karma he did earlier in his life that made him be married to two such attractive men who might be interested in a threesome.

(The marriage is very nice, but since John DID include a “till death do us part”, is broken up pretty quickly the next time John bonks himself on the head so badly that he needs CPR to revive. The threesomes, however, continue beyond the end of the marriage, at a rate of “whenever John swings through Central/Keystone which is remarkably more often than he used to”)


	13. Would You Ship - Kara/Barry/Len; Would You Ship - Len/Mick/Amaya

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the very short ones, I've doubled up
> 
> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**would you ship kara/barry/len?**

A: Answer: I don’t see why not! I think Len might have bitten off more than he can chew with TWO puppy-dog-eyes good-inclined superheroes, though.

How: For Kara and Barry, it starts via a quasi-pen-pal relationship. They’ve always had each other’s backs, they’ve always supported each other - even when everyone else in their world doubted them. Their affection grows from there, but obviously nothing could happen, right? Different universes. So they just pine from a distance.

Barry, meanwhile, is also mourning the what-could-have-beens of him and Len.

And then Kara gets a tip-off from an enterprising criminal mastermind who’s been operating in National City for two years, ever since he got spit out of the Oculus. Kara doesn’t know who he is, or why he wants to help her - all he says is that he remembers the importance of having good people around. She’s curious. She’s a journalist. She investigates. Except the more she learns about this Leonard Snart, the more intruiged she gets.

And so it continues…right up until the day that she mentions her newest crush to Barry. Who goes !!!! 

At first they think it’s a doppelganger, but nope, it’s Len.

Guess it’s time to work out a sharing system, because neither Barry nor Kara are willing to give up their villain (and, hey, if they’re already both sleeping with him, then why not each other, too?)

* * *

**Would you ship Len/Mick/Amaya - copious amounts of mutual pining/jealousy?**

Answer: Hmmm. Two different answers - would I ship Len/Mick/Amaya? Yes. With copious jealousy? Probably not. Little amounts of jealousy, maybe, just enough for some decent pining, but certainly not after the relationship starts.

How: so I know the traditional answer for this ship is Mick/Amaya get together then Len comes back, cue drama, but let’s think about it a different way. 

Let’s think about Amaya meeting a very charming thief on her first trip abroad from Zambezi, who’s volunteering to fight Nazis and who seems just as fish-out-of-water as she is despite the fact that he speaks the language better (except for some weird slang even the Americans don’t get). 

She likes him. A lot. It’s only when he disappears that she turns to her team leader for comfort. It’s only then that she joins the Legends - and finds out that her charming thief wasn’t exactly hers. 

He was Mick’s, first.

(It’s only later that she finds out that her memories of him are an anachronism - not one they need to fix, though. One they need to rescue. And then the fun begins!)


	14. Would You Ship - Mick/Felicity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**would you ship: mick/felicity?**

Answer: I don’t see why not!

How: Felicity was a hacker in college. A very good one. And, you know, maybe she still does a couple of little scams on the side even after she drops out of the big leagues, because a girl’s gotta afford college somehow, right? 

It’s not noticeable at the time that Mick’s one of her clients - they barely think of each other past the five minute money-fake papers exchange - but when they meet again, years later, she has a good feeling about him off the bat, offering him an umbrella or something.

When her relationship with Oliver ultimately implodes over all the lying (all. the. lying. often about the existence of the lying) for the ten thousandth time, Felicity has a sudden eureka moment: as long as she lives in Starling, she’s going to get back together with Oliver, and this pattern is never going to change, because Oliver really is a great guy, she acknowledges that, a strong and charming and interesting and heroic guy, but he also consistently prioritizes his knowledge over hers and no matter what she does constantly believes that she needs to be lied to for her own protection, and as a true-born “information wants to be free” hacker Felicity just can’t deal with that, so…yeah. They’re going to be doing this dance forever if she doesn’t leave.

So she leaves.

The first time she moves, Oliver runs after her with glorious statements and gestures, and she gets lured back in for a short bit (until the next revelation), and then she decides she needs to go -  
Further.

Cue the Waverider needing some help.

Honestly, if she thought she was going to hook up with anyone on board, she probably would have picked Zari, because Zari is her _soulmate in hacking_ and she loves her dearly but sadly Zari is straight. They both spend a good ten minutes over cold pizza and vodka deeply regretting that Zari is straight because, again, soulmate in hacking. And also commiserating about awful ex-boyfriends they’ve both had because, well, Felicity needs to spill to _someone_. 

And somewhere along there Mick shows up (probably lured in by the existence of vodka, or maybe it was the cold pizza) and well, he has those lovely, lovely muscles that Felicity likes so much, and if _Zari’s_ unavailable, well, you know what they say about getting back on the bicycle after you’ve fallen off –

No one knows what she’s talking about, because Felicity is very drunk at that point. 

Mick ends up putting her to bed (in her own bed, he’s not a pig). 

But Felicity Smoak does not regret her resolutions (even the drunk ones) and forward charge and all that. 

(It takes literal weeks for Mick to realize that she’s _actually_ propositioning him instead of just playing along with his innuendo-and-crudeness game, but by that point he’s already started to like her _because_ she’s playing along with him, so why not?)

And then somehow Felicity ends up talking to _him_ about _his_ ex-boyfriend situation and commiserating and wait, what was that about Kronos? and brain damage?

You’re in a _spaceship with access to the future_ , why do you still have brain damage?

Wait. Your brain was _literally reprogrammed_ and you don’t trust anyone on board enough to let them back in. Uh, buddy, Felicity and Zari TOTALLY have your back on this one. Let us help you!

Mick rolls his eyes at her and _corrects an error in her coding_ because he still remembers some of his Kronos stuff and uses it sometimes when no one is looking and that’s why he won’t fix the rest of it and welp, that’s it, Felicity’s a goner.


	15. Would You Ship - Lisa/Barry; Would You Ship - Olicity/Mick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Would you ship Lisa/Barry?**

Answer: As usual, the answer is - why not?

How: Lisa thinks Barry has a crush on her brother, and she goes to hound him about leaving Len alone. Len is very happy with Mick, thank you, and do you know _how much effort_ it was to get them together already?! Leave off!

Barry…okay, Barry maybe has a bit of a crush on Len, but it’s really more of a vague “hot person with a lot of charisma” thing he has. He tries to explain this to Lisa but she doesn’t believe him. In fact, she just keeps hanging around, flirting with Cisco and Caitlin and Barry, and…oh no. Oh no. Barry has a crush on TWO Snarts now.

(Lisa, meanwhile, has met Cynthia and approved her for Cisco, has had a threesome with Snow and Frost, has an open invitation from Iris and Eddie, and is looking to complete her checklist, except Barry is being meddlesome and refusing to engage in some nice NSA sex. And he’s…okay, he’s really cute. Prolonged exposure has made her start thinking some strange things about him.)

Len, in the meantime, finds this hilarious.

* * *

**Would you ship... Olicity/mick?**

Answer: Don’t see why not! (As I said, I can talk myself into…just about anything. Not everything. but lots of things.)

How: @wreathedinscales has written a wonderful get together series for Oliver/Felicity/Mick, which involves them courting him after the Dominator crossover, so I’m going to go a different route. 

Mick goes undercover in the most recent Legion of Doom/Darkness/Evil, and it turns out one of Oliver’s villains has kidnapped Oliver. He’s not torturing him or anything, just keeping him out of the way. Mick sidles over to say hello once he confirms that there are no cameras. He can’t, you know, let Oliver _go_ without blowing his cover, but he can report that Oliver’s team is doing just fine without him. He also sends a message to Felicity reporting that Oliver is okay so she stops worrying.

To the surprise of no one at all except maybe Mick, he’s now the go-between for the couple. Which have, you know, a LOT to say to each other.

Mick’s grumpy and annoyed about it at first, but hey, they’re newlyweds, there’s been a kidnapping, they ought to talk.

Then he starts getting increasingly invested in their relationship because - what? you lied about WHAT? to HER? and then she - you - WHY DID YOU DO THAT? He and Len had better communication skills, and they literally got into fistfights and tried to kill each other sometimes. 

Clearly, this has to be fixed before these two lovebirds blow up their relationship for good.

Meanwhile, of course, Felicity is growing increasingly charmed by this grumpy, crude, but well meaning (and very attractive) go between, while Mick’s visits are the highlight of Oliver’s days (also, Mick is very attractive in a not-guilt-inducing way) and when they finally do all move together to destroy the Legion of Bad People, they get together, kiss, look deep into each other’s eyes with a moment of perfect understanding and then turn to a pleased-looking Mick who had been supervising with an invitation.

And Mick, who likes everyone a little and these two a lot, accepts.


	16. Would You Ship - Iris/Len; Would You Ship - Ray/Mick/Len

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Idea: iris/len, pegging, y/n**

Answer: Yes. Definitely yes. I actually have a short Iris/Len fic in the works atm, though it went a different way than expected and so I may need to do another one of those. 

How: I’m not sure I can answer the “how” to this one without spoiling my fic. Instead I’ll go a different route: Len comes to Barry’s house for Christmas, there to warn them, and when Barry pushes him up against the wall Iris’ eyebrows go up and stay up and oh so this is the supervillain Barry keeps talking about. Mmmhmm. Very nice. Why doesn’t he stick around a bit, maybe for dinner?

Len was planning on dropping a comment and going. Barry was expecting him to do that. They did not anticipate Iris West putting herself in between them.

Len gets dragged to dinner, where he turns into out to be a sparkling conversationalist. 

Nothing really happens then, of course, because Iris is dating Barry and Len is in a nemesis-hero-relationship with Barry and, sure, they might sometimes meet up to flirt and quip at each other with lots of innuendo but that’s totally normal for Love Interest and Arch-Nemesis, right? Right? And Len kidnapping her once in a while and ending up helping her revise some articles is just him playing mind games. Yes. 

Then Len goes off on some stupid trip.

And then Barry sacrifices himself into the Speed Force.

Iris is not handling this well, and then Len gets himself spit out of a portal and he’s back - he need some care, and she can do that, but he’s back and -

Yeah.

Well.

Things happen.

So by the time Barry comes back, a good year later, Team Flash (now called Team Rogue, since Len recruited Lisa and recalled Mick and recruited Cisco and Wally into the Rogues because they was always a bit iffy on the legal thing anyway and maybe pulled in a few others) is doing quite well protecting Central City and Iris and Len are living together and…

Ooops?

* * *

**Would you ship Ray/Mick or Ray/Mick/Len more? And how? (Sorry, I couldn’t choose just one)**

Answer: Ray/Mick/Len more, definitely. What can I say, I’m a coldwave shipper (or coldwave plus more) at heart :)

How: Mick likes Ray from the start. Len is suspicious. 

Len loses his veto power when he gets himself blown up, which he’s perfectly well aware of so when he comes back and it’s been two years and Mick has still not yet bagged Ray Len is appalled. 

Clearly, time for some matchmaking shenanigans. 

Len always did like making an evil plan regarding a wide-eyed and naïvely cheerful hero.


	17. Would You Ship - Len/Leo; Would You Ship - Len/Barry/Leo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Would you ship Len/Leo?**

Answer: I would probably prefer Len/Leo/Mick, but could I by itself? Sure, why not?

How: It starts with a mirror Len stole. No, actually, it started with him being _incredibly_ vain as a self-defense mechanism, because you can’t trust anyone but yourself, but then it started with the mirror he stole. 

Because, you see, in this mirror, he looked in and the person on the other side looked - thinner. More tired. Worn down. Bruised in a way that Len hasn’t been since he left his father’s house. 

And they don’t move when he does.

So, obviously, they start talking, once they’ve pinched themselves and confirmed that this isn’t a dream.

Turns out it IS him, but from a different universe - a worse universe. A universe where the Nazis won.

Leo (his father died early, so he never got sick of the name) works in the archives, sifting through archeological treasures, and he found the same mirror that Len stole, and he’s just…failed to archive it properly. He leaves it in the storehouse, and steals to go look at it sometimes; no one has noticed it yet. It’s his first real rebellion against the system (he’s been too beaten down to try anything before) and it feels…good.

Len tells him stories from his world, the more rebellious the better, because he can’t imagine being in Leo’s place without having that hope.

Len takes the mirror with him and never pawns it. Leo takes it home. They keep talking. 

On Len’s advice, Leo goes to find his Mickey, and they click just as well as Len and Mick did even if they’re a lot more goody-two-shoes. Mick’s just as ace as ever in either universe, or else they’d marry him, but no one else fits them quite as well as he does.

No one but each other. 

Leo finds, then joins the resistance. 

Len ups his game constantly with an eye towards passing along skills that could be used in a resistance. 

They never expect to meet. That would be impossible, right?

Mick burns first, which is a good thing - good only because when Mickey nearly dies in that fire, rescuing people in their resistance, Leo knows all the burn-remedy medical tech that he helped Len learn to help care for Mick. Mickey ends up in a coma for a bit, and then Leo works to ship him out of the city to go recover in a safe place - he has to pretend Mickey’s dead, he has to convince himself that Mickey’s dead, because if he lets himself know that Mickey is alive then he might give away the truth of their secret hideaway.

Then he meets Ray. Right around the same time that Len meets Barry.

Leo is jealous of Len’s interest in Barry. Len is jealous of Leo’s interest in Ray. They don’t communicate properly, because they don’t have their Mick/Mickey to kick their ass about it, and things escalate until Leo is kinda-sort-dating-engaged??? with Ray and Len is doing stupid superhero stuff and -

Yeah.

Len gets blown up in the Oculus, except it turns out to be a portal and he ends up on a freaking goat farm somewhere…with a still-recovering Mickey. Len needs the recovery time himself, after his experience, and he gets to make friends with Leo’s Mickey in the process. He hopes his Mick is okay. He worries about Leo. But there’s nothing he can do about it until he gets better.

And then they get word from the main forces that a portal has opened…to a world of surprisingly familiar superheroes…

_Addition courtesy of oneiriad: Yes, good good. But what happens when Len and Leo actually meet in the flesh? I imagine Leo - after all the top Nazis got defeated on another world - finally goes to visit Mickey on the farm and is shocked to encounter his doppleganger._

_Of course, now that Leo has one of Cisco’s gizmos, Len can go straight home - can even take Mickey to visit the private hospital that’s been Mick’s go-to for burn related medical care for years. Or just visit Gideon, which is even better. And he should, he really should, because there’s Ray, and while he might be open for a threesome with Len and Leo both, he’s more of a one-superhero kinda guy in the long term. And Leo does love him._

Len and Leo have been each other’s far longer than Leo was Ray’s, in this one.

Leo does love Ray, but he loves Len, too, and they’re finally together and he just can’t give that up, you know? If it means they go their separate ways, well, that’s the way it’s got to be. 

(By coincidence, though, Ray is introduced to Ray as a joke about their names and they hit it off like whoa, so Ray is perhaps not as broken-hearted as he could have been. He missed having people who got his jokes and references. Plus the fact that Leo’s apparently been lying about Mickey being dead for years now, he’s a little pissed.)

And then you have Len and Leo and their long-suffering Mick/Mickey partners and they’re all very happy.

* * *

**Psssst, Would you ship Len/Barry/Leo?**

Answer: I don’t see why I wouldn’t.

How: It starts on Earth-X. Leo’s been dating Ray for a while, but he’s intrigued by Barry, and Ray’s pretty open-minded. Barry, who is still pining a bit over his missed opportunities with Len, decides to go with it, with Iris’ permission (she trades it for an opportunity to pounce on Mick, who cheerfully agrees). Ray, meanwhile, starts flirting with Raymond. It’s all a lovely mess of relationships.

And then Len comes back.

Now Leo is worried that Barry will only want Len, and Barry does want Len but doesn’t want to give up the soft lovely version that is Leo because he wants them both for totally different reasons and Iris has made it very clear that Mick is a permanent feature not a fling (but only to Barry and not to Mick, who she’s worried will want to go back to crime with Len) and -

Len listens to everyone (EVERYONE) spill their feelings at him, declares them all idiots, and kidnaps both Barry and Leo for a nice long weekend while Mick explains to Iris that he’s very good with the idea of being a permanent feature in her life and also he has too many heroes to watch out for to go back to crime permanently.

Len might take some more convincing, but he now has TWO heroes in his bed to keep him honest, so Mick’s not worried.

(A few days after this is all settled, the Rays stumble out of their laboratory, beaming like the golden retriever puppies they are, and say “Did we miss anything?” at everyone else. No one answers, but they do get pancakes.)


	18. Would You Ship - Kronos/Savitar/Leo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Would you ship - last one, I promise - Chronos/Savitar/Leo?**

Ooooh, the OT3 of alternates. Certainly.

How: Leo gets trapped in Earth-1. He finds that while he was gone, Earth-X nuked itself to high heaven and back, and there’s nowhere to go. No Ray, no resistance, _nothing_. So he’s stuck here, where everyone looks at him and sees only Leonard Snart, criminal extraordinare. He can’t even walk through the streets of (a very foreign) Central without being recognized.

He’s a bit bitter about it.

Make that very bitter.

Until the day that Mick comes to him with haunted eyes, the wreckage of a mission gone bad and a world going to hell in his eyes, and says: “There’s something I want you to do.”

He gives Leo a timeship and a time and a place, and Leo goes. 

He meets Kronos there.

And of all the people in the world, he - and only he - with his face like Leonard Snart but with a softness Leonard Snart never had - can stop Kronos in his tracks. Kronos loves and hates Leonard Snart in equal measures, but this Leo? A version of Snart with nothing and nobody, with a softness and an openness and an ability to love?

He has to have him.

Leo likes being needed, so he tells Kronos that he can have him, that they can try to be together, but that they need to do one little thing first.

They need to fix time.

And to fix time, to fix it _properly_ , they need help.

Finding Savitar is easy enough. He’s a time fragment that created himself and scattered himself through the timeline; he appears in many places. The God of Speed won’t stop for many people, but he will slow down when the face of Leonard Snart and Mick Rory appear before him. He will stop when they tell him that they, like him, aren’t who they seem to be. Kronos was Mick Rory once, but he isn’t now and may never be again, and Leo was never Len, and they’re sick and tired of being looked at like they don’t belong.

Just like Savitar.

Leo tells Savitar the ending of his story: dead with a bullet in his head for all his advantages, and Barry and Iris happily married over his corpse. Savitar hates it.

Leo tells Kronos the ending of his: redeemed by Len, but then to lose him more thoroughly than ever before, to never to have him ever again in any form. Kronos hates it.

So they change it.

It’s not hard to do, if you know where to go.

Kronos never kidnaps Len Snart: he comes to him, instead, with an offer of peace - of truce he would never have been able to offer, if he didn’t have Leo by his side. Len looks at his double and asks him to keep a close eye on his Mick.

Leo agrees to keep a close eye on Kronos instead, and sends Len back to his Barry, to ask for his aid and to finish the mission against Savage. Barry happily joins them in exchange for the threat of Savitar has been removed - utterly unexpectedly. 

Len Snart takes Barry Allen’s place at the Oculus, but he does not die, because a wild-eyed speedster god takes the place for him: but a god cannot die that way, and he takes the power of the Oculus into the blue with him as he runs away laughing. 

Barry Allen and Len Snart go to be heroes together.

Leo Snart smiles at his duplicate, and goes off with his speedster and his hunter, and they go -

They go anywhere they damn well please.


	19. Would You Ship - Mick/Ronnie/Caitlin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**ooh would you ship mick/ronnie/caitlin?**

Answer: Why not? 

How: Mick ends up sitting around with Caitlin after they kidnap her for longer than expected. The silence has shifted from threatening to just plain awkward.

“…do you know what's keeping your friend?” Caitlin ventures.

“Probably flirting with the Flash,” Mick says with a sigh. “Or editing the kidnapping video for the third time. He’s kind of a perfectionist.”

“I get that,” Caitlin says, not without sympathy. “I used to be a _terrible_ perfectionist before I met Ronnie.”

“So there’s a cure?”

“…no.”

“Didn’t think so. Figure I would have found it by now.”

“Oh? You been together long?”

“Nearly thirty years,” Mick says. 

Caitlin finds herself smiling a little. She doesn’t think she knows anyone who’s been together for thirty years.

“You’ll never guess how we met,” Mick adds, rolling his eyes. 

Caitlin smirks. “He was getting into trouble?”

Mick grins at her. “Got it in one.”

Caitlin remembers she’s supposed to be angry and they lapse back into silence.

After a few minutes of additional awkwardness, she says, “Do you want to threaten me again?”

“I feel like I’ve kinda lost the moment, you know?”

“Fair.”

A few more minutes.

“So what were you doing out in the middle of the day like that?” Mick eventually asks. “Don’t you have a regular people job?”

“Well, yes. I went out on my lunch break.”

“What for?”

“Personal project.”

“Ah,” Mick says. “Boyfriend.”

“I did not go to see my boyfriend,” Caitlin says stiffly. 

“But it relates to him,” Mick says. 

“…maybe. Probably not. He’s probably dead.”

“Why only probably?”

“Well, he died in the Particle Accelerator explosion,” Caitlin explains. 

“Then why probably?”

“…have you heard of the Burning Man?”

Mick’s eyes light up. “You’re dating the Burning Man?”

“I don’t know if it’s Ronnie -”

“I’ve been collecting sightings,” Mick offers. “And triangulating for a location.”

“You _have been_?”

“Yeah! He’s a guy on fire, why wouldn’t I be interested?”

Caitlin attempts to remind herself that she’s been kidnapped and she shouldn’t be making small talk. But… “How can you triangulate? There’s only been about 6 articles I’ve seen, and none of them include a location.”

“Psst, articles,” Mick says, waving a hand. “I’ve been asking the criminals and the homeless and the prostitutes; they’ve got a lot more intel, and not the sort of stuff they’re willing to share with the cops.”

“Really?” Caitlin says, getting excited. “Can you show me?”

“Sure thing.”

When Len finally returns twenty minutes later, he sighs and rubs his face. “Mick,” he says after a few moments of willing the scene in front of him to disappear. “Why is the hostage untied?”

Caitlin and Mick are crowded around Mick’s Sightings Board doing some sort of weird calculations and talking to each other. Caitlin abruptly realize that she’s been untied for twenty minutes and has not tried to escape; she blushes. Mick, on the other hand, beams at Len. “She knows the Burning Man! She might be able to talk him down when we catch him!”

“Please tell me you’ve talked him down from the plan with the net,” Len says to Caitlin.

“I kind of liked the net plan,” Caitlin confesses. “If we use a heat proof wire -”

“Mick,” Len says, covering his eyes with his hands. “You need to stop adopting hostages.”

“Has he done this before?” Caitlin asks.

“Well, it’s our first kidnapping,” Len says. “But we feed about 16 stray cats on a regular basis.”

“Not the same,” Caitlin objects. 

“Because you’re considering sleeping with him?”

“I am not!” Caitlin exclaims.

“Uh-huh,” Len says. “Right. Mick, we need to go fight the Flash now. You can pick this up later.”

Caitlin hesitates.

“We won’t actually hurt him,” Len says. “We just need him to show up. Can we drop you off at home?”

(When they end up catching Firestorm and separating Ronnie and Stein, Mick is a little disappointed, but Len gets the gratification that he was right about Caitlin wanting to sleep with him. He didn’t call the whole ‘lost fiancée also wants to sleep with him’ thing, but he gives himself extra credit for that.)


	20. Would You Ship - Barry/All the Rogues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Would you ship Barry/all the rogues?**

Answer: Yes. Definitely.

How: It’s the end of the world. The Justice League did all that it could, but when they couldn’t stop the apocalypse from happening, they fell apart, each hero returning to their own city - less to try to stop the crisis individually, which they already did not believe was possible, than to die fighting at home in the place they loved most. Barry is no exception here; he’s known best for his endless ability to hope for the best, but when his strongest allies falter, when the seemingly endless damage continues, when his friends begin to die, he can’t help but despair.

He goes home to do what he can.

But just when he thinks it’s all over, the Rogues come out of the woodwork. All of them, his best enemies: Captain Cold, Heatwave, Golden Glider, Mirror Master, Weather Wizard, the Top, the Trickster, the Pied Piper, Captain Boomerang…all of them. They’ve always been survivors - criminals, yes; anti-social as a requirement, and they have to be crazy enough to keep putting themselves up against the fastest man alive (assuming there are no speedster villains around this week), but underneath all of that, they’re people who can put themselves up against impossible odds and survive time and time again, and they do it this time, too.

They grab Barry one second before the end and hide away from the worst of it. They’re trapped together for days, even weeks, riding it out, unable to speak or do much but together through it all. 

And then they come back out, and it’s a brand new world. A surprisingly large portion of Central and Keystone survived, courtesy of the city’s general cooperative nature: the Families and the Rogues and the general everyday people all saw what was coming and decided, quite sensibly, to put aside all conflicts. Only the really crazy ones (Reverse-Flash, Grodd, etc.) felt the need to throw themselves into the oncoming storm and die, and honestly they’re all better off without them.

Barry collapses under the sheer weight of his relief, seeing his cities still standing. He hadn’t slept right in months; he needs it now - weeks and weeks of it, a modern-day Sleeping Superhero paying off that sleep debt all at once.

While Barry sleeps, the Gem Cities start rebuilding, keeping it down and quiet to avoid threats from the outside; the Rogues refuse to be leaders, no way no how, are you crazy they’re _villains_ , but somehow end up giving suggestions that everyone else listens to anyway. Less because their suggestions are all reasoned and sound (the Trickster’s especially) but because there’s an acknowledgement that this brand new world is going to be hard to survive in, and to survive you need the brilliance of the unexpected.

Barry wakes up, and the Rogues expect him to leave them: they’ve gotten used to having him around, both awake and asleep, but he’s Barry Allen, the Flash, the Fastest Man Alive; he’s got a job to do. He always does. And that saving-the-world job doesn’t exactly mesh with the Rogues. 

Except Barry’s the same as his cities in this manner, and he’s not about to let go of the Rogues now. He stays. He rebuilds, and rebuilds again, and he comes home on time to the hideout (really more of a headquarters, since it’s not exactly hidden anymore) by Captain Cold’s curfew that was set because they don’t want him building up that sleep debt again, and he - stays. With them. 

Living in the same house, eating at the same table, brightening their conversations with his smiles and his intelligence and his faith in their abilities and his steadfast hope that he’s now put in them.

They like it.

He likes it.

They don’t talk about it, and it works, and so they keep on not talking about it - there’s a city they have to rebuild, after all. They’re going to live in their quiet corner of nowhere as long as they can and let no one burst their bubble by bringing in reality.

Of course, that’s not entirely possible.

Barry runs to see what happened to the other cities, once, loaded down with all the stealth items the Rogues can invent for him to keep him hidden. Most of them are utterly destroyed, empty wastelands of ruined buildings with the population fled if they still live - Coast City isn’t even there at all anymore, the entire chunk of the West Coast having just broken off into the blood-red ocean that doesn’t seem like it’s changing color back anytime soon. 

Gotham’s survived, somehow, but no one’s surprised about that; Gotham is like a weed, or a cockroach, or some sort of Lovecraftian monster of a city: it was always going to make it, though in what shape, no one knows. 

Even Barry doesn’t dare explore it any further than that initial confirmation.

The first refugees start coming to the Gem Cities soon enough after that, lured by the whispered sightings of a streak of lightning - the last superhero standing.

Some of the refugees are people Barry once knew.

The bubble starts to burst.

Heatwave is the one who kisses Barry first, though they all want to; he’s always been the most straightforward thinker, the most accustomed to loss, and he wants to have at least some of the joy before it’s gone forever: back to the role for which Barry was born, the city-leader, protector, superhero.

Barry kisses him back, which is a surprise. He also kisses Captain Cold, next, because he happened to be in the room, and then Mirror Master and Captain Boomerang because they were just next door, and then he speeds through the city to gather them all up and bring them home to talk about it.

Once they figure out that Barry’s in, all the way in, that he’s got no intention of leaving, that this brand new world is theirs to keep, bubble or not, it ends up not involving a lot of talking at all.


	21. Would You Ship - Mick/Nate/Amaya/Ray

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Would you ship Mick/Nate/Amaya/Ray?**

 

Answer: All at once? Seems a bit much. I’m also not a huge Nate fan, so there’s that. But let me think about it. 

How: It’s on the Waverider, of course. 

Gideon helpfully only has one screen for showing 20th-21st century movies, and that means Nate and Amaya’s movie date night, Nate and Ray’s movie bro-night, and Mick’s ninja/sci-fi movie marathons all have to happen in the same place, and really in the end it’s easier to just combine them all into one event.

Sure, it’s a little awkward the first time Nate and Amaya forget that the other two are there to start making out, but Mick’s not moving and Ray, despite his initial discomfort, isn’t going to move if Mick’s not, so…yeah. It’s just a thing. And when Nate and Amaya do remember them, they’re all cool about it. No biggie. You do you; have fun. Of course, then it turns out Amaya and Nate have a bit of an exhibitionist kink that they were previously unaware of, so they just keep pushing the limit a bit more every time: more intense make-outs, hands moving all over, clothing being removed…and Mick and Ray just keep hanging out, watching the movie. Half-oblivious, half-all-too-interested.

Till, of course, the day Nate and Amaya are practically banging a few short steps away from them and, halfway through, invite them to join.

Mick thinks they mean Ray, and tells him to go ahead, but they make it clear that it’s both of them and, well…Mick’s not exactly one to say no, and where Mick goes confidently, Ray generally follows, and visa versa. 

So that happens.

And then, a few days later, it happens again.

And again.

Eventually Mick works with Gideon to take down the wall between one set of rooms so that they can have one big room all to share, and keep smaller versions of the original rooms in the event that they want some privacy.

It all works very well.

They have no idea that Sara, Wally, and Zari are _totally unaware of this_ until the day Amaya kisses all three of her boyfriends good luck on a mission, and then there’s a lot of hilarious “wait WHAT?” that happens.


	22. Would You Ship - Kendra/Mick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**you've written kendra/len, so... would you write kendra/mick?**

Answer: I don’t see why not.

How: It would be during season 1. Instead of getting ditched after the time pirates, Mick gets benched. Kendra, who is constantly also getting benched on account of Savage, ends up with babysitting duties. 

Mick is pissed.

Kendra is also pissed.

They end up arguing. Loudly. She thinks he doesn’t care about her dying horribly. Mick points out that he doesn’t know her from a hole in the ground. He wants to go home. She also wants to go home. Neither of them want to be doing this. Being a barista was never this hard. He disagrees: he’s been a barista. Kendra agrees (loudly and angrily) that he has a point, but that he still tried to sell them out to pirates. Mick argue that she would have sold them out too if it would have gotten her Savage on a platter. She points out that she wouldn’t have trusted them. Mick argues that he wasn’t _trusting_ them - or certainly not any more than she was trusting that asshole Rip Hunter who showed up out of the sky with empty promises. Kendra concedes he has a point about the “going on the spaceship with a stranger offering candy” comparison. They mutually agree that they are pissed off about everything.

At some point this turns into less of an argument and more of an emotional boil-lancing about all of their FEELINGS about how things just keep HAPPENING to them: Kendra has a son! no wait he’s dead. Mick’s partner’s back! no wait he wants to be a supervillain. No, a superhero. Kendra’s soulmate was a jackass, but he’s also dead so does that excuse him or something? She’s not sure. Mick is pissed off about Len trying to change his history because meeting Len saved his life and it wouldn’t have happened if his dad wasn’t such an ass, but he feels he can’t say anything because he knows how much Len suffered. Kendra is really sick of being benched because of her stupid reincarnation thing. Mick wasn’t really going to stay in 2046; he just wanted Len to talk to him about it. 

A giant spurt of feelings-gushing for two people who are, by and large, extremely locked down and not inclined towards feelings-share - admittedly, Mick covers his with gruffness and crudeness and tough-guy-ness and Kendra covers hers with insecurity and shyness and passive-aggressiveness, but _either way_ neither of them do it much - inevitably results in them feeling closer to each other than they’d really feel comfortable with.

Another fight immediately ensues in order to get them back on track, except now there are feelings in the air and the atmosphere is charged and emotional and intimate and well long story short they’re making out against a wall for a bit until they mutually realize that the position (Kendra’s legs wrapped around Mick’s waist and her arms around his neck) can also be achieved when Kendra’s wings are out and that’s super cool so they try that for a bit, too.

Cue an unreasonable amount of sneaking around and “Gideon don’t record this” and denials and whatnot despite the fact that _no one cares that they’re together now_ , but which they both secretly enjoy tremendously.

When Kendra’s inevitable flashbacks to Carter start happening, Mick is so incredibly melodramatic about it that she ends up having a bona fide spine-chilling illicit affair behind the back of her _already dead boyfriend_ and honestly that just adds to the fun of it so it kind of works for her in a way an earnest and sweet relationship wouldn’t - she IS the sort of person who ran off with someone claiming to be her soulmate after like two days of knowing him, after all.


	23. Would You Ship - Kara/Savitar; Would You Ship - Oliver/Barry/Len

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**would you ship kara/savitar?**

Answer: I mean, I’ve never thought about it before, but why not?

How: They catch Savitar instead of killing him, but then what do they do with him? He mocks them from his cell, using his access to Barry’s perspective as memories to screw with people; he’s dangerous; he nearly escapes multiple times, and he makes Barry feel _awful_ about _everything_.

So they send him to Kara. Without Cisco’s abilities, he can’t jump back to Earth 1, and between Kara and the DEO, they have experience trapping people. It seems like a perfect solution.

Except, well, Kara has a bit of trouble seeing someone with Barry’s face as a villain. He’s got to be redeemable. So she starts spending time with him, talking with him, reasoning with him. He has Barry’s memories of her, but his new memories from Barry have cut off now that he’s trapped in this new world, so he has the satisfaction of knowing that these memories (the first ones ever) are all his. 

He’s antagonistic at first, of course. Very much so. But, well, Kara has other enemies to go fight, and every time she goes, Savitar is really bored. And if she has trouble with said enemies, well, that takes even more time away from him - and what, like a god like him is going to spend time chatting with _scientists_ and _bureaucrats_? Please. Kara’s the only one who measures up.

So he starts helping out. Advice, at first - he has traveled through hundreds of years at this point, he has experience - and later, when they go up against some really bad villains, ones that might actually threaten to hurt Kara, even physical aid (even if they do make him wear essentially a remote-control shock collar to ensure they can get him back). 

He’s an ass, but Kara finds him funny, and he does help out -

And then some Kryptonian assholes show up, all conquer-this and superior-that, and Kara is in real danger, and Savitar breaks the shock collar - but runs to her rescue anyway. He shows up and freaking _bluffs them out_ , doing his god routine and sneering at them until they accept him as his peer, and he runs circles around them (both figuratively and literally) until he can free Kara and they can fight them, side by side and back-to-back.

And after that…well. He helped them out of his own free will. As far as Kara’s concerned, that’s redemption, and he’s part of the team now.

(He’s still an ass, but Kara does kind of like that. At least he’s consistently honest about it.)

* * *

**Would you ship Oliver/Barry/Len?**

Answer: I mean, I could? I don’t innately, but I could. 

How: Oliver likes Barry. Barry seems to like Oliver, but keeps talking about this one really charming supervillain. Oliver really wants to be super judgy about it but he’s slept with a good 50% of his supervillains so, uh, yeah, he probably has no moral grounds here. Still, it’s a bit annoying because he’d love to start a relationship but he can’t quite figure out if Barry’s interested in return.

And then Captain Cold meanders over to Starling for a bit, pulling the same “yes I steal stuff and you can’t stop me but also sometimes I help out against the bigger villains” shtick for a while. Oliver would object, except…well…he really did help against those initial big bads, so he guesses he has to put up with him?

But he wants to be clear that he doesn’t like Len. Not at all. Zero liking. Zilch.

(Oliver is crushing on him so hard. So hard. He retroactively feels guilty about judging Barry about it so bad.)

Eventually Barry shows up and it gets even more ridiculous, since Barry is flirting with Len (there’s good in you!) and Len is flirting with Oliver (come take a walk on the wild side) and Oliver is basically a giant failwhale at flirting at ALL since his old habits of flirting used to be “I’m rich wanna fuck” and his new habits of flirting are “I am Dark and Broody and Must Never Love Anyone” and neither was really very good even if they were weirdly effective so he’s just flailing around trying to flirt with everyone.

Eventually someone (multiple someones) lock them in a room together with instructions not to come out until they’ve resolved their UST.

This causes Barry to go “Wait, we had UST? Why didn’t anyone tell me?!" while the other two just groan, headdesk, and mutually agree to jump Barry while he’s still protesting that he was totally not flirting (he was totally flirting).

After that, they set up a nice ongoing thing and just - see where it goes from there.

(Felicity keeps asking if she can record them. She gets three different answers each time.)


	24. Would You Ship - Len/Diana; Would You Ship - Mick/Cisco/Caitlin; Would You Ship - Len/Diana/Barry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**Would you ship: Len Snart/Diana of Themyscira?**

Answer: Always. One of my top crack ships.

How: I have a very fond place in my heart for That Time In The Comics Where Len Signs Up To Bodyguard Lex Luthor Who Then Joins The Justice League So Now Len Is In the Justice League Oops. 

Either way, though, Diana is well respected, internationally beloved, and a leader of the Justice League when she visits Central City because Barry invited everyone to the opening of the Flash Museum. In the process, she bumps into Len, who is casing the place out for the inevitable supervillain fight that’s going to happen there (he’s going to make SURE one happens there).

Len is a giant Wonder Woman fangirl and asks for an autograph. She agrees, then asks what he’s doing there. He explains. She’s a bit charmed by his honesty, and also by the fact that he’s doing it because The Narrative Demands It (seriously, it’s a superhero museum, he’s gotta do it). Besides, Themyscira isn’t exactly big on the concept of property, so the whole “theft” thing isn’t that big a deal to her - if that’s the only bad thing he does, while also helping fight big bads and save the town, then he’s just fine in her book. 

She doesn’t tell him this, of course. 

And then Barry gets distracted by a Grodd attack and, well, Diana’s in town. Maybe this nice supervillain would be so kind as to show her around? Maybe point out the best place for a nice dinner. Or buying some ice cream to eat while walking in the park, she’s heard that’s nice. 

Len is delighted by the chance to show off his city to his (second) favorite superhero (sorry, Barry takes priority, but that’s just because he’s part of the Central City landscape, you know, and Len loves Central City above all of his other loves) and totally doesn’t realize that they’re on a date until he gets a kiss at the end of the evening.

Must be a fluke or something. Barry probably messed up the time stream.

And then they go out on another date. And another. And -

Wait, is he _dating Wonder Woman_?

(No one believes him. Not the Rogues, not his sister, not the other members of the Legion of Doom, no one.)

(At least until Diana swings by to give him a kiss for good luck in public before the team-up against Darkseid or whoever the really big bad is this week, and which point Everyone Has Questions And Possibly Concerns. Not that Diana cares.)

* * *

**Would you ship Mick/Cisco/Caitlin?**

Answer: Sure, why not?

How: The scene opens at a nice café-slash-bar in downtown Central. Cisco and Caitlin are sitting at a table, looking extremely long-suffering. After a moment, Mick walks into the room in full Heatwave gear, looks around, sees them, and comes over.

“I was gone for two months,” he says flatly. “Do they always do that now?”

“Yes,” Caitlin says.

“Assuming you’re referring to the weird flirting-eyefucking-innuendo-ish-bantering thing that the Flash and Captain Cold are currently doing on live TV in the middle of the street, yes,” Cisco says.

“I need a drink,” Mick says.

“Have a seat,” Caitlin says. “We ordered a bottle.”

“Do they realize how ridiculous they’re being?” Mick asks, sitting down.

“No,” Cisco says. “At least, I don’t think so? Either way, the newspaper people are currently paying us a great deal of money not to interfere because the Coldflash - yes, that’s what they’re calling it, no I didn’t name it - the Coldflash sitcom-slash-soap opera is the biggest draw on television nowadays. It even eclipses the latest dumb thing the president did.”

Mick frowns. “Can I interfere?”

“Do you know Iris West?”

“No?”

“You will,” Caitlin says. “And she has no mercy. Do not interfere; this is the most fun she’s had with regards to Barry’s love life in years.”

Mick sighs. “Can I at least get some of that money?”

“You have to give interviews,” Cisco says. “Spectator drama - interview with old friends, coworkers, etc. We’re Anonymous Co-worker/Sidekick 1 and 2, respectively.”

“Cisco insisted on being number 2,” Caitlin says. “Something about a Prisoner reference.”

“I can be Co-Supervillain,” Mick muses. “And I’ve known the guy for years. That counts. I can’t believe I’m considering this.”

“It’s our life now,” Caitlin says, pushing the bottle of vodka towards him. “Just drink.”

(They end up waking up in bed together, but really, that’s just what they deserve for putting up with Len and Barry’s SHEER RIDICULOUSNESS.)

* * *

**Would you ship: Leonard Snart/Diana/Barry Allen?**

Answer: Yes. Definitely.

How: Okay, to try to make it different from the last one I answered: this time, it’s all Barry Allen’s fault. He’s charming and he’s pretty and he’s - well, he’s a giant mess. 

Diana finds him extremely confusing because she doesn’t understand how he can be such a good person and also a pathological liar at the same time. Very suspicious. So she goes to investigate. 

Said investigations lead to the _utter mess_ that is Central City, where Barry’s best friends enjoy naming (or being?) supervillains in their spare time, Barry’s supervillains are friendly and buy her ice cream in the middle of their heists, and where she’s starting to think up means down and down means up.

Clearly, a further investigation is warranted.

(Finding out that Len and Barry are dating is not really a surprise. Being invited to join in is also not a surprise. Finding herself agreeing? Something of a surprise. But then, Diana’s always been curious. It’s for the investigation. Really.)

(Okay, maybe not, but at least she can report to Batman that she was very very _thorough_ in confirming that Barry is not secretly a villain.)


	25. Would You Ship - Mick/Bruce Wayne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meme: Let’s Play “Would You Ship This?” Send in a pairing or two, and I’ll tell you if I would ship it and how.

**If you're still accepting them: would you ship Mick Rory / Bruce Wayne?**

Answer: Definitely yes.

How: It starts when Mick meets Poison Ivy entirely by accident at one of those Legion of Doom/Supervillain Support Group/Excuse For Everyone To Party On Lex Luthor’s Dime events, where they got into a really cool discussion about how fire can help certain types of trees regenerate better, since it mixed his interests (anything related to fire) and hers (anything related to plants). Since he didn’t seem like a total waste of space, Ivy invites him to Gotham for a bit.

Mick is currently having an argument with Len (Len is dating the Flash again and it’s stressing him out) so he decides - sure, why not? He’s never laid low in Gotham before (because it’s a hellpit of a city, he conveniently forgets). 

The thing is, Batman is a very good detective and also kind of a classic Jewish worrywart so the second Heatwave comes into his city, he begins stalking him because obviously he’s here to be up to no good, right?

He’s, uh, obviously up to no good as he goes to visit various tourist areas. and at least two famous bakeries, and four different pizzerias. And spends an entire evening reading a book in one of the parks (in full supervillain gear, but that was on Ivy’s advice to keep away the muggers). 

Clearly, this scheme is even more cunning than Batman realized, because Batman is having serious trouble figuring out _what it is_. That basically never happens. 

Mick, of course, realizes that he has a shadow and decides to treat it the way he would if it were Barry following him around:

“I’m going to leave this very suspicious but very tasty pizza here,” he says to the air. “Then I’m going to go away and it’s going to disappear, how terrible.”

“Same with this delicious bomboloni I got from the Italian pastry shop run by the mob.”

“I’m going to go break into the Chrysler Building today around 11 - that work for you or would that interfere with patrol?”

“Uh, so, I may have gotten into an argument with this asshole guy with some sort of burlap sack over his face, and maybe sorta punched him out, but in my defense he was being really rude about arguing that my pyromania was based initially on pyrophobia which, duh. Could you, I don’t know, do something with him for me? I promise not to look while you spirit him away.”

“Can you recommend a therapist that isn’t in Arkham? Those guys just don’t strike me as good shrinks, you know? Even if Ivy says they’re better than nothing, I figure there’s got to be someone decent.”

Batman has never been treated this way by any of his villains. Ever. 

It’s kind of fun.

He’s…he’s having fun.

What the fuck.

Obviously, the only solution to this is to get Bruce Wayne kidnaped by Heatwave (and Poison Ivy, since he helps her out on some of her visits-to-the-local-nursery-to-pick-up-the-flower-beds-she-ordered-but-we-call-them-heists) so that Batman can get an inside view on this whole thing.

But, see, the problem is that Gotham only doesn’t know that Bruce Wayne is Batman because they’re _so familiar_ with who Bruce “Terminal Idiot But Very Rich” Wayne is and obviously he can’t be Batman. 

Mick does not know celebrities. He does not know Bruce Wayne.

He _does_ recognize burn marks that originate when SOMEONE snuck up on him when he was fixing his heat gun and got himself slightly singed as a result. 

So about an hour or so into the kidnapping he goes over and quietly asks, “Uh, do you want me to let you sneak out so you can stop this? It’s not as fun when the superhero isn’t available.”

Bruce stares at him.

“Central City rules,” Mick says helpfully. “We coordinate our calendars sometimes. There’s an app for that now.”

Batman is going to have to have a Talk With Barry Allen again, clearly.

In the meantime, however…

“Would you like to go out with me?” Bruce asks. He’s always had better luck with supervillains than with fellow superheroes, or with civilians, and really, once you know the secret identity you’re basically part of the family. 

“Like on a heist?”

“I was thinking a date.”

Mick blinks. 

Len’s gonna judge him so hard, but he has no grounds giving that he’s dating his own superhero. Maybe a few accusations of hypocrisy.

Eh, Mick can handle that.

“Sure,” he says. “Why not?”


	26. Would You Ship - Len/Mick/Caitlin(/Cisco)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One last one, but this one turned into a full fic

**Would you ship Len/Mick/Caitlin?**

Answer: Sure, why not? (yes, I know this is my stock answer, but literally 90% of these prompts have the thought process of ‘well I mean I never thought of it but now that I think of it I’m sure I can talk myself around into it’)

How: I’ve already discussed how Caitlin and Mick could meet during 1x4, so let’s do something a little different. 

(uh you got like a fully fledged fic starter with strong Caitlin feels and maybe some Len/Mick/Caitlin/Cisco happening, so I’m putting it under the cut so that I don’t kill anyone’s dashes)

It starts after the Particle Accelerator, but before Barry wakes up. Nine long months - for Caitlin, it’s nine months of grieving Ronnie, nine months of being all alone in the big haunting edifice of what she can only see now as their own hubris, nine months of ignoring angry phone calls from her mother and friends telling her that she needs to quit her job before she’s irrevocably tainted more than she already is (and then nine months of having those phone calls taper off, one by one, leaving her all alone but for Cisco and Dr. Wells).

She’s too loyal to go now, but everyone else does, and as much as she likes Cisco, he’s usually buried elbow-deep in another project - she can’t blame him, that’s how she handles grief too, by burying it deep in her work. It’s just, well. There’s always tech that needs to be fixed, tech that could be invented, and having only one engineer to do all the measurements as to the ambient dark matter spread into Central City using all of their machines is definitely not enough, so there’s enough to keep Cisco busy.

Caitlin has only one patient. 

Dr. Wells refused her care, which was…okay, it was a bit offensive, because why the hell was she hired if not to care for people? Yes, okay, she shifted her specialty to nutrition and general care, not emergency, and she definitely didn’t remember her neurology lessons well enough to deal with paralysis, but say that to her raging insecurity: he was taken away (she doesn’t remember how, actually, but she assumes some enterprising ambulance got to him) and he came back a few weeks later in a wheelchair, claiming permanent paralysis. 

(Claiming, because while she doesn’t _not_ believe him or anything, he refuses to let her see his medical records, and she can’t for the life of her find out what hospital he was checked into.)

But Dr. Wells did change things around in the lab, saying that he wanted her to start caring for people who suffered from the explosion, saying that that would be her job now, and she was full in on that - she was comfortable with that - this would be her penance, her distraction from Ronnie, everything -

Except, well. 

They only have one patient.

She has nothing _against_ Barry Allen, to be clear. Well, actually, she doesn’t know him as anything other than a medical problem, but he’s been very good on that score: alive with no heartbeat (actually just a super-accelerated heartbeat), the weirdest muscle development (not only are they not atrophying, he’s, like, kind of developing abs?), all sorts of weird things. 

But one guy in a coma is not really what she thought she signed up for here. She’s bored.

She walks around the Accelerator a lot, trying to force herself to become comfortable with the place that killed Ronnie by sheer force of will.

And one day, she hears a noise.

She’s not sure why she heads straight toward it - she’s a woman, alone, in a place she’s afraid of; it’s late; she knows _better than this_ , she’s not a character on the first few minutes of a television show where people get murdered or something, and maybe she shouldn’t have been mainlining police procedurals with Cisco because that’s the first place her brain goes and she’s so busy arguing her to herself that she’s being stupid about it because _obviously_ it’s not going to be a break-in that she actually walks into a break-in in-progress before she entirely realizes what’s going on. 

She stares at the guy in there. He’s older than she is, with greying hair cut short, but he has frankly amazing eyes and cheekbones and seriously, he can’t be a thief; people with cheekbones like that become models with sad backstories, not criminals. This is not a _television show_ , and if it was she would be having words with the casting director about his choices in life. 

Well, it isn’t _that type_ of television show, anyway.

He stares at her.

“…would me leaving now help?” she offers, because honestly it’s not like she cares all that much about the equipment that got left behind by some of her less-loyal probably-wiser colleagues. She’s not going to be running any spectrum analyses on the collision of infinitely small particles, after all.

“Not really,” he says, though he sounds regretful. “Too much of a chance of you pulling an alarm when you get out of here, y’know?”

“I understand entirely,” she says. He has a gun in his belt. Caitlin feels like she should be more scared of that. Possibly screaming. But honestly, she’s been walking around the Accelerator for the last two hours torturing herself about Ronnie and all the people in the city who’ve been harmed by their participation in this project and how selfish she is, and honestly she’s used up her emotional quotient for the day. “Anything I can do, then?”

“Why don’t you have a seat?” the handsome thief suggests.

“On what?” she asks. The storage room is kind of a mess. 

It ends up being on an upturned crate. 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” the handsome thief assures her. “I don’t do collateral damage unless necessary; as long as you sit there quietly, I’ll let you go when I’m ready to be on my way.”

Not having much choice, she agrees, and honestly? It’s better than being alone. She hasn’t seen either Cisco or Dr. Wells in four days - Dr. Wells to do something in his home, and Cisco in the labs. 

So, perhaps inevitably, she starts talking. Just a little, in bits and spurts - she’s still Caitlin Snow, after all, and she’s only brave when she’s angry, but this thief is so ridiculously out-of-place handsome and polite, like some sort of novel character, that she can’t quite help it. 

He asks her for her advice on what was the most valuable, and she confesses that she’s not a Real Scientist like the rest of the employees, and maybe mentions that it’s always been kind of a matter of embarrassment for her - top of her class at medical school, prestigious internship at a major hospital, moving to work in private medicine at a laboratory to be around non-doctors but not realizing how left out being around non-doctors would make her feel, at least until Ronnie noticed her feeling left out and came to her -

Yeah. She ends up talking about Ronnie.

To a _thief_.

Who is _in the process of robbing her place of business_.

It’s _embarrassing_ , that’s what it is.

It’s also kind of cathartic. She can’t talk to Cisco about it - he feels guilty over Ronnie’s death, she knows he does; she can see it every time he glances at her finger and the ring it no longer wears - and she certainly can’t talk to Dr. Wells, who’s practically become a recluse and must feel even worse about the whole failure - and god, she’d never talk to her _mother_ about _anything_ (she’s not even sure she told her mother she was dating anyone, much less engaged) - so, yeah, a total stranger is looking pretty good right now.

(The fact that he does, in fact, Look Pretty Good is probably helping her subconsciously classify him as a good guy, even though he obviously isn’t.)

It also doesn’t help that Handsome Thief is really sympathetic about it, even as he cleverly breaks down the high-analysis microscope and package it away into boxes that he’ll be able to cart out of here and sell. He even ends up sharing some of his own stories: his best friend got caught in a fire, too, just like Ronnie, an explosion turning into an inferno, and while he got him out, he was the one responsible for bringing his buddy in there and he’s been too guilty to see him ever since. 

It happened pretty recently, too. She can see it in the pain in his eyes, the way his usually smooth voice cracks when he’s talking about it, the way that he’s -

Well, the way that he’s clearly burying himself in work the way she is.

Caitlin immediately shifts into care mode, offers some suggestions, and he looks deeply grateful for them.

“If you bring me his chart, I could take a look,” she offers off-handedly, the way she would to anyone. “I could at least give you an objective perspective - I did a few rounds in the burn ward.”

She realizes how ridiculous it is a second after she says it - he’s a thief! they’re not friends! - but he smiles at her anyway, and it looks a little lighter.

After a while, he does take his stuff and go, and he doesn’t even lock her into her office like he initially planned (just asks her nicely not to call the police right away), and while she ultimately does call the police and make a report about it, the CCPD is terminally disinterested in _anything_ happening in STAR Labs other than more problems. They promise to send someone to look but never do, and Caitlin is too tired and worn out to really follow up. Not like it matters.

She thinks that’s the end of it.

Not for the first time in her life, she’s wrong.

Leonard (he tells her his name this time) actually does show up again, with a smile and a cup of coffee for her and (of all things) a medical file for her to look at, because he apparently took her offer seriously.

She introduces him to Barry Allen (it’s only polite, even if Mr. Allen is currently in a coma) and lets them make each other’s acquaintance while she reviews the file (Michael Christopher Rory, the file name says, and she doesn’t know if that’s a fake name or a real name but she ends up not bothering to google it because honestly she doesn’t want to know). Leonard doesn’t mind taking up the duties of talking to the coma victim - having different voices is a good thing, it helps stimulate the brain centers - and she does end up walking him through the injuries, which are pretty bad but could be worse and it looks like Michael - “Mick,” he corrects her - is reacting on the top end of the healing spectrum. 

He’s going to be okay.

Leonard exhales long and deep when she tells him that.

“I wasn’t sure,” he confesses. “I’m paying the clinic people; I didn’t know if they were telling me what I wanted to hear or what.”

“Doctors don’t do that,” she says.

He gives her a fond look. “Maybe _your_ kind of doctor, Snowflake.”

She blushes a bit at that, even though it’s hardly innovative. 

He gets up to go.

“Won’t you stay a bit longer?” she blurts out, and he looks surprised. “It’s just - well - there aren’t many people here - and - I - I mean -” She’s stuttering.

“I have to go now,” Leonard says, but he looks pleased. “But I can come back tomorrow, if that works for you.”

It does. It really, really does.

And yes, Caitlin is aware that Leonard continues to take things from STAR Labs every time he visits, whether it’s big things he takes out in boxes or just random things he slips into his pockets (he can’t seem to help himself), but she doesn’t care; it’s company. Non-judging company.

And anyway, if anyone (Dr. Wells) really cared, they’d have a security system, which they don’t. Not even cameras or a good lock on the door, much to Leonard’s dismay - a dismay that gets even worse when Caitlin tells him that Dr. Wells hasn’t even been by more than once a month, that no one is keeping a catalogue of the 

(She tells him about her mother one day, on her birthday, when no one calls her at all - not her old friends from medical school, not Ronnie’s old friends, not even a voicemail from her mother. He tells her, in turn, about his father: short, choppy sentences, not very clear. Neither of them say the word ‘abusive’ - emotionally abusive, physically abusive - but it’s hanging there in the air, somewhere between their feelings and their feelings _about_ their feelings, and how they hate that they can’t hate their parents the way they would if it was anyone else.)

Cisco wanders upstairs from the lab one day during one of their meetings and just assumes that Leonard’s a friend of Caitlin’s (or maybe of Ronnie’s), jumping in and introducing himself and showing Leonard some of the cooler tech that he’s creating (Caitlin puts her head in her hands when she sees the interested look in Leonard’s eyes because yep this is going to get stolen next time around she just knows it) and next thing she knows Leonard and Cisco are talking about turning the Heat Device Of Ultimate Hotness into some sort of _gun_ and yeah, she’s just going to let this happen.

(The Heat Gun is a thing of beauty and Cisco starts work on the Cold Gun immediately and Leonard loves it on first sight, like, true love soulmate sort of thing to the point of Cisco playing romantic music in the background while Leonard cuddles it in his arms and suggests new alterations and Caitlin dies laughing. At some point Cisco is informed about the fact that Leonard is a professional thief, but he _still_ doesn’t get it and mostly congratulates Caitlin on being even more epic and awesomely badass than he’d previously believed, and you know what? Caitlin is going with it. Being badass is better than being the grieving not-yet-a-widow that everyone pities.)

Caitlin does keep trying to convince him to go make up with his best friend (she’s invested now: she almost feels like she knows Mick with all the updates she gets on his health, the way she feels like she knows Barry despite never having spoken with him) and he keeps insisting that he will, as soon as the Heat Gun is completed and he can give it to his friend as a please-forgive-me-gift.

(Cisco asks why his tech is being given as gift. Leonard reminds him that he’s a thief. Cisco starts teasing Leonard about being Arsene Lupin, and somehow that turns into movie night? Yeah, that’s a thing now.)

They never get around to introducing Leonard to Dr. Wells. It’s way too awkward a conversation.

They do get to meet Mick, though, once Leonard gives him the Heat Gun and shyly brings him in to meet them. 

Mick is gruff and honest and funny and has muscles that gleam even under the raised scars of his burns that he’s proud of, and after he and Leonard leave, Caitlin and Cisco get very drunk and talk about how incredibly and unfairly attractive both Leonard and Mick are and somehow this turns into them finally having that talk about Ronnie that they never had (Cisco blames himself, she blames herself, all the blame blame blame) and it feels so good to get it off their chests.

Leonard and Mick keep coming by - Mick and Cisco discover a joint love of ninja movies - and they’re not even pretending that it’s for the stealing anymore, if it ever was after that first time. 

They keep not telling Dr. Wells about it.

Still too awkward.

It only gets _more_ awkward after Caitlin finds herself kissing Leonard after she makes a serious breakthrough in her research, the way she used to kiss Ronnie, and he kisses her back before stopping and stepping back and telling her that she should think about if this is what she wants because he’s not willing to be a rebound.

She does think about it, she does, honest, but Mick’s a lot less shy about it and insists on stealing a kiss, too, if his partner’s already taken one, and Caitlin never in her life thought she could have anything after she lost Ronnie, much less _more than one_ anythings, and she wants it. 

She wants both of them.

(Cisco bitches cheerfully about her being too damn lucky, but he knows he’s invited anytime he pleases.)

So, yeah. 

It works pretty well for them: the movie nights and the tech-geek-outs and the work and the love and the happiness.

They keep not telling Dr. Wells. It’s their own personal thing; he wouldn’t care, anyway.

And then Barry Allen wakes up and the Flash is born.

(Then things get complicated.)


	27. Flashwave - Everyone Knows/Mistaken for a Couple + Accidentally Saving the Day

You can always send in more than one! I love answering these, and I could use the distraction! :D

There are so many I want to do, but I've settled on: 63. Everybody Knows/Mistaken for Couple and 100. Accidentally Saving the Day. for Flashwave? 

ace-o-clubs

You can always send in more than one! I love answering these, and I could use the distraction! :D

Flashwave, 63 - Everyone Knows/Mistaken for a Couple and 100 - Accidentally Saving the Day

Ooooh, this is clearly either a beautiful set up for We Saved The World Together And Now The Tabloids Think We’re - WHAT?!

It starts, I think, in the fight with the Dominators. Intrepid reporters totally not named Iris West did some very key reporting, including several cut-off sequences of audio recording on their iPhones - Barry spoke alone for his (attempted) self-sacrificing decision, there was static, and suddenly there’s Mick’s voice, giving him a pep talk. He was the only one speaking loud enough for the phone to catch. And once his voice is matched up to the guy on stage at the Presidential awards ceremony - and then, after a burst of interest in Who Is The Flash Dating?!, identified as…supervillain Heatwave?

No.

_Yes._

The media goes wild. Speculation is rampant: how did they meet (well, everyone knows that one), how did they get past their enmity, when did they get together, does anyone knows about this?! Does this have something to do with the disappearance of Leonard Snart? Wait - did the Flash “put away” his romantic rival in an attempt to win his supervillain crush’s heart? Did they plan it together? (It’s eventually confirmed that Len sacrificed himself to save the world, but obviously that’s not nearly as fun, though a few tabloids do switch tracks to run stories about the grieving widower being comforted by the presence of his beloved’s archenemy for a while) Is Leonard Snart’s mysterious reappearance from the center of a portal in the middle of Central City (confirmed to be the original, not the Leo duplicate that was running around a few months back) going to cause strife for Central City’s beloved Batman-Catwoman pairing? (Several supporters in Gotham send letters objecting to this characterization, and Bruce Wayne makes another offer to buy the tabloid out, but no one wants Gotham to own anything in Central, sorry-not-sorry!)

Mick and Barry have no idea what the hell is going on, of course. Totally bemused. But Barry keeps getting Make-a-Wish requests to pose with Mick, so he convinces Mick that they should do one - ONE - public appearance as a couple, then a few weeks later announce that they’ve broken up, and that’ll be the end of it, right?

Of course, that’s when the portal opens up and the invading armies of Atlantis demand to speak with the Ruling Pair of Central City…

Honestly, it’s just easier to go with the assumption.

They swear.

Being found making out in a closet after negotiations are concluded was totally just stress relief.

Really!

(No one believes them.)


	28. Coldwest - Everyone Knows/Mistaken for Couple + Curses

Coldwest 63 - Everybody Knows/Mistaken for Couple and 98 - Curses

Okay, so does anyone remember that early-season episode of Buffy where Spike and Buffy are hit with a spell that makes them think they’re in love and going to get married and no one can convince them otherwise despite the fact that they were still enemies earlier that episode?

That.

Except in reverse.

See, the cupid-themed villain was bad enough to begin with, what with their tendency to make people fall in love and rearranging people’s lives to make it as if they’ve always been together, just because they like to play with dolls - super creepy. But then they fall for the “dashing” Flash (who was unveiled to be Barry fairly early, because it’s the biggest open secret in Central), and, well…

Yeah.

Iris is extremely peeved to suddenly be down one boyfriend.

She is EVEN MORE peeved to discover that the cupid-themed villain decided to make it so that she and - seriously?! - Leonard Snart were together, so as to reduce competition for Barry’s affection.

From both sides.

(Len would like it to be known that while, yes, he would totally hit that, he’s JUST SAYING, but he’s not a homewrecker and he wouldn’t have interfered. Unlike some villains, which have no class.)

Except, here’s the thing - when Len came back from the Oculus, he maybe-kinda-sorta got some powers. More specifically, a resistance to powers. So when the Cupid Arrow Beam hits them both, they’re unaffected.

…no one else is, though.

Joe is Not Talking to Iris because of her terrible life choices and how could she possibly dump Barry for THIS GUY? Camille promises that he’ll come around at some point, really! The Legends have already RSVPed for the wedding…which is now Len and Iris’s wedding…Len keeps getting the shovel talk from Barry…Iris keeps getting the shovel talk from Lisa…Mick just gives everyone literal shovels because honestly, he’s 6'2" and he has a heat gun and a record for arson, the shovel talk is already implied…

Clearly, the only solution is for Len and Iris to band together, pretend to be going along with this whole marriage business, and find a way to throw off the evil Cupid-Lady’s spell, save Central City, and win Barry back!

(I know this prompt said Coldwest, but honestly there’s a better-than-decent chance that “win Barry back” turns into a joint goal here. If you prefer to keep it strictly coldwest, you could always set it early enough in the Iris-Barry relationship that the weaknesses in that relationship become evident the longer the quest takes, but honestly I’d probably take a left turn into coldwestallen towards the end)


	29. Flashwave - HIstorical + Bar/Restaurant

Flashwave, 1 - Historical AU and 5 - Bar/Restaurant AU

This could be set in so many different eras, though! 

The classic quasi-fantastical ye old “medieval” country tavern on a British road (actually more likely set in the 1700s, lets be real), where the dashing highwaymen like to stop by and Mick likes to flirt with the barkeeper’s pretty son while his partner flirts with the barkeeper’s pretty daughter? (Allusions to the Highwayman poem would be made. Alternate endings would be written, given how that poem ends.) 

Or maybe Mick is the keeper of one of the old Roman tavernas, or maybe a popinae if they’re feeling fancy, a crossroads college, a gruff pack of criminals that are nevertheless respected for keeping that particular territory, making them responsible for making sacrifices to the local godlings and demigods - with Mick being particularly responsible for it, because the rest of the Rogues are more interested in the food-drink-sex-gambling aspects of the collegium - and one day he meets a very interesting person, clearly in disguise, and he’s not entirely sure if Barry is a secret demi-god or maybe just a wealthy senator’s son come to slum with the rest of them, but either way Mick’s intent on showing him a good time? 

Or maybe it’s the Dark Ages or actually medieval times and Barry lives in an abandoned monastery, growing cheese and fretting about the untended state of the vegetable garden (it’s too much for one man to handle!) when a pair of knights come limping in during the middle of the night, claiming that they just escaped from a giant battle nearby (Agincourt, perhaps?), and Barry agrees to house them until they’re better, with Mick offering to help out around the place while Len recuperates from his wounds? Only for Barry to come to suspect that his “knights” are no such thing but rather thieves who put on the heraldry of fallen nobility in order to disguise their actions and to ensure that Len got the care he needed, except by that point Barry’s far too charmed by Mick (who takes care of the garden and helps with the milking and the cheese-making and everything) to turn them in?

Or maybe it’s the French Revolution, and Mick’s running a Jacobin wine shop down in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a revolutionary wine shop where Len gives stirring speeches and rouses up the citizenry and everyone just pretends that he wasn’t the area’s most notorious thief, and Barry is a wide-eyed idealist come down from the fancier parts of town to listen to the Words of the People straight from their mouth, and Mick gives him a drink on the house because he’s feeling sorry for the poor kid getting shoved around from all sides (and pickpocketed three times over), and somehow they fall to talking and it turns out Barry’s interested in what Mick has to say, too, rather than just his more charismatic partner’s views? And somehow this turns into a dashing mission to save Paris from the evil plots of the noble émigrés who want to stop the Revolution and crush the rising forces of equality beneath their feet once more, possibly even resulting in them reporting their findings to the (extremely tired and sleep-deprived) members of the Committee of Public Safety? Or if this is earlier in time, possibly to Marat, who will get it to the people who need to know, and if not to them, then he’ll be damn sure to put it in his tireless newspapers? (Yes, this isn’t the Scarlet Pimpernel, I’m pro-Jacobin, live with it. If the Scarlet Pimpernel exists in this universe, Barry will take up a red suit and promptly be the anti-Pimpernel hero of Paris.)

Maybe Mick is protecting Barry from the Deluge, with the Swedes invading and the Cossacks uprising again and the Polish towns being destroyed left and right? Or perhaps we’re in Turkey and Barry is a janissary recruited to do investigations, except he’s more interested in finding out what happened to his mother all those years ago (yes, yes, he knows, the official story is that he was kidnapped and converted, the usual, but there’s more to it than that!) and he stumbles into a nest of thieves? Or even something else, further afield?

…too many options.


	30. Coldwave - Teacher + Dystopia + In Vino Veritas

Coldwave:  
20.Teacher AU   
21.Dystopian AU   
77.In Vino Veritas 

Ooooooh. I like this. I like this a lot - not least because it combines so many aspects.

So the world has ended, let’s start with that. Meteors began to fall upon the earth, the governments unwisely fought back with nukes but even then couldn’t stop them all, explosions everywhere, opportunistic wars starting left and right, the sky is darkened (but luckily not fully blackened), it’s too hot everywhere, people are sick and dying, it’s awful unless you very quickly pick up some methods of ensuring your survival.

Len, alone but for his sister now that his dad met a…very unfortunate and abrupt end…has decided to take up thieving. He’s actually quite good at it, but he has little Lisa to watch out for, and he’s so very tired. He needs someone to watch his back, but he can’t trust anyone nowadays. Too risky, and every day there’s less and less pre-made food for him to make. They’re starving.

And then they meet Mick.

Mick, who grew up on a farm, who knows how to grow plants, who had an obsession with fire that led him to learn more than anyone ever needed to know about plants that require heat and darkness to thrive. 

Mick, who’s come into Central City to reclaim the parks in favor of green-life, who’s opened a gigantic collective (they don’t call it a school) to teach city people with no useful skills in this new world a new trade - farming or construction or craftsmanship or all of those at once - and who catches Len trying to raid the food supplies, but instead of turning him in, he brings him in and feeds him and his sister. 

After all, there’s always a use for good thieves in this new world.

…at this point, I would go into several endless chapters of world-reconstruction plot and how they’d remodify the city to make it work (the subways tunnels are now mushroom groves! corporate basements are cheese caves!), and then, just when everyone - both in-universe and out - is about ready to kill Len and Mick if they don’t stop dancing around each other in an unbearable fit of UST, someone finds a catche of liquor.

And, hey, it’s the anniversary of the world ending, so why NOT party? and get drunk? and maybe make confessions that you wouldn’t have otherwise made?

THANK GOD, everyone else in Central City shouts at them. PLEASE JUST KISS ALREADY.

Oh, dear, isn’t this embarrassing, all of these emotions, whatever shall we -

KISS. WE WILL LOCK YOU INTO A ROOM IF WE NEED TO.

Yeesh, there’s no need to get so -

YES THERE IS.

Could you all stop yelling?

NO.

We’re not drunk enough to actually -

WE CAN FIX THAT.

Well. If agreeing to go off and get down will get us more of the liquor…


	31. Coldflashwave - Fairytale + Secret Relationship

Coldflashwave  
25\. Fairytale AU  
54\. Secret Relationship

Ooooh. You know what, I’m going to go with a version of Rapunzel here - Eobard being the evil sorcerer-king who has imprisoned Barry up in a gigantic circular tower until he learns to run fast enough to break time and send Eobard back to his own time, except of course unlike in canon it’s going to take more than a few months to get up to that speed. Years, even. Barry’s so alone and sad, and while he has adorable animal-and/or-statute companions (I’m going with Disney-style fairytales this time, damnit, and you can’t stop me) named Cisco and Caitlin who help care for him, it’s not the same as having company.

Also, there was this asshole prince who came by, but Barry analyzed him for a while and determined he was one of the Prince Charmings who would probably sing “Agony” while ripping their shirt open in a waterfall only to dump Barry the second the mystery is resolved so, yeah, no, he’s opting out. Also, he vaguely recalls Tony was a jackass to him back when they were in school together (technically a fancy tutor for local princes and nobles, but whatever, we’re going with a multiple principality system here, something like middle ages Germany/Holy Roman Empire with all of the different electorates or whatever, so yes there was a school) and yeah, he’d rather be alone.

He’s just at the point of starting to be lonely enough to regret that when two thieves break in.

In their defense, it was raining.

Barry would like to state for the record that it was mildly drizzling at MOST and they were clearly breaking in to steal stuff.

Len, never one to back down from an opportunity to make a terrible joke, asks if Barry counts as “stuff”.

Barry explains the whole Evil Sorcerer Speedster King Eobard thing.

Mick offers to burn him alive.

Barry thanks him for offering.

Mick offers again because, no, really, he was being serious. Happy to do it. Pro bono, even. That guy sounds like an asshole.

Barry - isn’t exactly sure what to do with that.

Len points out that Eobard literally locked Barry in a tower; what more does he have to do before Barry’s willing to take him down?!

Barry concedes that this is a good point. He really does want to take Eobard down! And obviously these two nice people couldn’t possibly be actual thieves/murderers like they’re pretending to be, they’re far too kind and generous. But still, Eobard’s kind of scary and will be hard to defeat, and Barry can’t let them take him on alone - no, the best approach is still for him to get faster and defeat Eobard. 

Still, Eobard’s not coming back for a while, so why not stay in STAR Labs for a little longer…? Just until Barry is fast enough to defeat Eobard. 

Len and Mick start using the place as their home base and helping Barry train his speed, except their methods of teaching are much better than Put The Guy In a Tower And Come By Every Few Months To Yell At Him method that Eobard is using, so Barry actually does get faster. 

Cue falling-in-love-while-training-Barry sequence/montage, possibly set to the tune “You Can Learn To Do It” from Anastasia or whatever it’s called.

Interlude in which Barry discovers that Len and Mick actually ARE thieves/murderers like they’ve always said they were, and moreover that they might be involved in the demise of the ruling Allen family of Central City and possibly the death of his mother, terrible misunderstandings take place and Barry chases them out of STAR Labs and even turns them in (in fact, Barry reaches out to Tony and gets him to throw them in his jail by promising to marry Tony even though he doesn’t want to) because he’s angry and hurt and not listening. 

And then Barry ends up going up against Eobard alone only for Eobard to confess that HE was responsible, and poor Barry is horror-stricken at what he’s done…

Only for Len and Mick to come to the rescue because honestly, Barry, you don’t think that asshole could possibly keep them back, do you? Prison breaks are their specialty (next to thieving). And anyway it turns out that Tony was working with Eobard because he was ruling Barry’s principality while Barry was missing, that’s why he wanted to marry Barry, and that made them so mad that they decided to come help anyway. Apologies can be made later.

Eobard is defeated in a grand public way, Tony is exposed and banished back to his own kingdom where he’s just a third son, Barry reclaims the throne and takes two spouses because, honestly, Central has a speedster monarch capable of miracles - they’re not going to complain about the weirdness NOW. 

(Besides, Len can’t resist the opportunity to make a joke about Barry’s metabolism requiring TWO people to take care of it, and suddenly everyone in the kingdom is nodding like that’s totally reasonable and there are dirty songs, some of which Len may have composed, and goddamnit, Len! When Barry said he hoped the people would learn to accept their relationship, he didn’t mean START A PR CAMPAIGN TO ACHIEVE IT!)

Roll credits.


	32. Coldwave - Historical + Bookshop + Forgotten First Meeting + Unexpected Virgin

Coldwave  
1 - Historical  
6 - Bookshop  
57 - Forgotten First Meeting  
90 - Unexpected Virgin

It starts, of course, in juvie - or rather, in the workhouse, where orphans and wards of the British state are sent to stay. Mick saves Len’s life from a bunch of assholes who took exception to Len’s mother being black and a former slave, Len wide-eyed and adoring, and they are close as close can be for a few short months before Len’s sentence (he was caught for theft, and the judge was lenient in ordering him to the workhouse for a while to scare him straight rather than imposing a death sentence) is up and he’s taken back away by his dad, while Mick - who has no family left anymore, not after that terrible fire that he didn’t even start but couldn’t move to warn anybody about so everyone blames him anyway, his whole neighborhood gone up in flame - remains behind.

Time passes. 

Mick grows up, alone and ostracized, but tough and strong and capable of violence and arson and murder, if need be. He works wherever they need manual labor, in the factories and in construction and in the dockyards. He has a million opportunities to sleep with whores, but he never takes them up on it - he’s uninterested in anyone he doesn’t know well, more attracted to a person’s mind than their body, and the few whores that hang out with him enough for him to develop an attraction towards have already started to see him as a brother by that point, so he just…doesn’t. Even as the years pass and his virginity becomes more awkward, and everyone makes assumptions just from looking at him, big and strong and muscular and tattooed. It’s easier to just - not.

And then the war begins.

Mick was unfortunate enough to be a visibly able-bodied man in the dockyards when it begins, so he gets pressed, of course; a miserable process, and he’s not exactly what one would call a natural sailor - it’s not his element, to say the least - but he figures it out eventually. He gets decent enough at the work of sailing - never particularly great, but who the hell cares when he can wield a bar of iron into men’s skulls when they try to board? 

Then, of course, there’s the mutiny, and suddenly Mick’s a pirate now? He wasn’t even involved - slept through the whole thing and woke up to the new status quo - but what the hell, he didn’t care for Britain much anyway. 

He likes being a pirate better anyway - they don’t make him do scut work (the new captain prefers Mick to hover intimidatingly over his shoulder as his new enforcer) and he even has time to do some reading in the old captain’s quarters, since the new captain doesn’t give a damn about any of those books. Mick likes reading, even if he’s slow and mixing up the letters, and he discovers that there actually is one aspect of sailing that he’s good at, and it’s navigation. He might not be great at reading, but he can calculate angles in his head like nobody’s business, all the math making perfect intuitive sense to him. So he starts learning up on it, because an enforcer is only as good as their last fight but a navigator is priceless. But there’s only so many books in the captain’s office, and there’s more to learn out there, and Mick’s finally found a career he thinks he can tolerate. 

That’s why, the next time they dock in Port-au-Prince, Mick goes to find a bookstore.

And in that bookstore, he finds Len. Len, whose father’s business went bankrupt and they returned to Haiti to live upon his mother’s father’s money for a while - he’d been freed alongside his daughter for some great deed and inherited some measure of property in the process, and when he died he left it all to her, and upon her death it was left to her husband - and when that, too, ran out, Len was kicked out into the streets alongside his half-sister Lisa, the daughter of Lewis’ second wife, a white wife, and now the two of them don’t quite fit in: Lisa white as a daisy except for when her skin darkens to gold, but with Len pale but obviously mixed-race by her side, there’s always questions, and Haiti’s got some issues going on. Still, Lisa could make a good marriage if Len only managed to get her a dowry, so he ends up parlaying some pretty epic heists into running a bookstore, a more stable and respectable career (but for the smuggling operation that makes up most of the back end, but hey, what can you do? If you can’t be a thief, be a fence.). 

Mick comes to buy a book, and Len flirts, and they very slowly start to get close - it’s not until the war comes to Haiti, an invasion force intent on destroying the town and burning it all, that Mick saves Len once again and in a moment of sudden realization Len recognizes him as the boy he fell in love with all those years ago. After saving the books, he decides that he shouldn’t be a coward and figures the worst Mick will do will be to say no.

Mick doesn’t say no.

Mick says yes, and means it, because he’s recognized Len too, now, the memories all rushing back to him, and he never thought he’d see Len again, and even if he hadn’t remembered him, he was already feeling things about this beautiful bookkeeper. But when Len tries to pull him into bed he resists for a little, causing Len to doubt himself - at least until Mick confesses the truth…

Len’s more than happy to take care of Mick’s little virginity problem.

Really, it’s a public service. 

(And then they sell the bookstore and use up Len’s savings and get their own ship and run around as pirates making a killing for a decade or two before they finally settle in another city somewhere, maybe somewhere in pre-colonial America, somewhere near the center, and now they have their own little fleet of merchant ships because Len manages to parley his bookkeeper past and fencing skills into a pretty decent tradesman career. Lisa decided against entering into a respectable marriage, despite all of Len’s best efforts, and insisted on being a pirate with them, but she does eventually marry a nice Spanish engineer named Francisco Ramon who’s madly in love with her. They all live happily ever after.)

@leeferal: Would Barry and Wally be the captains of a pair of extraordinarily fast ships sent to capture the notorious pirates?

Answer: yes, absolutely. In fact, that’s what leads to the end of their pirate career - the Flash catches up to them, but there’s a storm and a crazy third party they both need to defeat, and next thing you know Len is giving Barry advice on how to ignore assholes who disapprove of Barry marrying a black girl and Barry and Wally are offering to get them a pardon (well, more of a retrospective letter of marque) and next thing you know, they’re all neighbors.

and then they all get swept up in the American Revolution because Mick becomes buddies with Georgie.


	33. Coldflash - Coffee Shop + It's Not You Its My Enemies

Coldflash   
4\. coffee shop AU  
66.It’s Not You, It’s My Enemies

Hah, this is actually pretty similar to the longfic I’m writing right now, An Internal Affair, but let’s go a different route.

Mick is the one who bought the coffee shop, to start with. Len thought it was a dumb use of the heist money, but sure, whatever, why not? And, yeah, after a while, he admitted that it’s kind of nice to have a set place to come back to, a favorite seat in the corner where he can sit and plan new heists, and there’s always hot chocolate (with mini-marshmallows!) and nice fresh-from-the-oven pastries and sandwiches, and you know what, why not? It’s a great way to launder their money. Excellent idea. Len has no idea why they didn’t think of it earlier.

And then - HE happens.

Barry Allen.

Bane of Len’s existence.

See, Barry’s never there at the same time every day, but somehow by magic he’s always there in time to steal Len’s goddamn favorite seat. 

Naturally, of course, the only reaction to this is to sit next to him and be super passive-aggressive about it, except Barry finds it really funny for some reason and starts being passive-aggressive back, and suddenly it’s a whole War between them and okay, yes, they escalate to hate-making-out and maybe not-so-hateful-making-out pretty fast after that. Len really likes the guy, okay? He has no idea why Mick is laughing at him; it’s not like he was ever serious about all of those complaints - okay maybe he was - okay so there was rather a lot of complaining - maybe he did take it unreasonably - okay, shut up, they’re dating now, okay?!

Except, well.

Len still thinks that going Captain Cold is a great idea. 

Barry is still the Flash.

(This is discovered quickly, and really it just ends up being another stage of their War-slash-weirdo-dating-rituals.)

More importantly, though, Eobard is still out there, and he doesn’t like this new relationship of Barry’s - Barry is supposed to be straight, marry Iris West, and his favorite enemy is supposed to be Reverse Flash, damnit! So he works with the local Families, who hate Len with a passion, and there’s an attack on Mick’s precious coffee shop. They try to burn the place down to blame it on Mick, who still has those arson convictions from way back when, and in the meantime Eobard attacks Len and nearly kills him.

Barry manages to stop both the burning and Eobard, just barely, but now Barry thinks it would be safer for Len not to be with him (Eobard is dangerous!) and Len thinks it’d be safer for Barry not to be with him (the Families are dangerous!) and Mick is upset about his shop (both Len and Barry are super guilty about that) and there’s a whole lot of unnecessary angst and drama before Mick snaps and yells at them both that they’re going to work together, defeat both sides, and then he’s finally going to get to have his coffee shop in peace.

They do, it works, and they live happily ever after. 

Mick even begins a franchise with the proceeds from his civil case against the Families.


	34. Kara/Savitar - Scars + Fake Married

Kara/Savitar  
96 - Scars  
51 - Fake Married

“Hahahaha,” Kara says, not laughing, when Barry calls to tell her about the Terrible Awful Situation going on over on his earth. She called him so she could bitch about HER earth’s problems, but then she had to go and be polite and suddenly there’s, like, revelation on all of their faces and she doesn’t like that sort of ‘eureka’ expression when it’s directed at her. “You want me to take who where when now?”

But nope, they’re actually serious, and that’s how Kara ends up carting home the unconscious body-double of her friend Barry.

His name is Savitar, apparently, and he’s evil, because of course he’s evil, hello, evil twin concept?

She ends up having to drop him off with the DEO before he wakes up so she can go solve, like, a million and one problems, except then she gets a million and one more and one thing leads to another and she sort of, kinda, maybe, forgets that he’s there? At least until the entire thing reaches a ridiculous crescendo, world-ending stuff, and now Lena wants a tour of the DEO and oh boy oh boy is this day - week - month not going anywhere near how she planned it, and that’s how she ends up bumping back into him.

Because he’s just walking through the halls of the DEO like he’s got nothing better to be doing.

“Um,” Kara says, assuming someone has authorized this without telling her, because they never tell her anything. “Hi, Savitar! How’s it going?”

He blinks at her.

“Your name is Savitar?” Lena asks. “Isn’t that Hindu?” Then she says something which probably means ‘do you speak this’ and Savitar replies in the same language and nope! Kara is not being out-shone right now, this is her cool tour of the DEO and/or one and only chance to super impress Lena in the hopes that she’ll forgive her when the inevitable “Kara Danvers” thing comes out, so Kara goes, “Savitar’s a speedster! Wanna see us race?”

That’s how they end up racing.

That’s also how Savitar figures out that Kara has a crush and starts trying to flirt with Lena himself.

(About twelve hours later, when they finish their whole whirlwind city tour/competition and Lena’s dropped off at home, they return to the DEO going on the fritz and it turns out Savitar was NOT authorized to be out and about. Oops.)

Either way, Savitar’s kind of a dick and super emo, but he ends up being a really fantastic person to have ice cream and sigh over Lena’s cheekbones to terrible music with, so Kara’s cool with it.

“You know I’m not Barry Allen, right,” he says after a while.

“Psst,” Kara says. “Would Barry Allen listen to Evanescence on repeat fourteen times? He would not.”

“He has a dark side,” Savitar says. “Or else he wouldn’t have been able to turn into me.”

“You’re not dark,” Kara says encouragingly. She’s heard good things about positive thinking. “Just gray and super vengeful but with no way to get back to your earth to wreak havoc on your other selves, so in lack of any other purpose you’re kinda just…there. Gray. Like a stone. Rock! Like a rock!”

“A rock isn’t actually better than a stone.”

“Sure it is! Really!”

She has no idea how they got from there to her showing him her class ring from school and him crouching down (well, SHE’S not moving off the couch) to get a better look and then BAM.

Portal opens under their feet, and suddenly they’re on a reality television show.

No, literally.

A stellar-wide television show for which they’ve been kidnapped for, in which newly engaged couples get to battle each other in a deathmatch, because apparently they can be counted on to have really great emotional reactions when their fiancé/fiancée gets injured. 

“What if we weren’t married?” Savitar asks.

Turns out the answer is that they get portalled to an incinerator (like, center-of-a-star incinerator) so no one discovers the mistake.

“Well, soon-to-be-hubby,” Kara says brightly, unwilling to test her Kryptonian skin against a million nukes going off at once, “Looks like it’s fight-fight now, kiss-kiss later!”

Somehow THAT’S the thing, after all this time, that gets Savitar to actually smile.

He’s surprisingly attractive when he smiles, in a way that Barry Allen really isn’t. Maybe it’s the scar that gives him some depth of character, maybe it’s the fact that Kara had a serious emo phase as a teenager, but whatever it is, well, it’s going to help with the fake-married thing they’re about to do. But it’s totally, definitely, 100% going no further than that!

(Kara will admit, later on, that she might have been wrong about that.)


	35. Coldflashwave - Interrupted Confession of Love + Accidentally Saving the Day

coldwave or coldflashwave with 59 (interrupted confession of love) and 100 (accidentally saving the day).

Imagine, if you will, a gigantic battle - truly gigantic this time, the entirety of Central City risen up to fight against this new threat (there’s always a threat: army of gorillas? fleets of insectoid aliens? mind-controlled citizens? something, but this time it’s a legion of killer robots intent on reformatting the city to be their own, no matter how destructive that would be), and Barry is leading the charge, Len and Mick at his side. 

It’s very much a last ditch effort, and what Barry knows and the citizenry doesn’t is that the robots are jut drones, governed by a single hivemind Queen, and the Queen is burrowed deep into the earth, and if they can’t disable her in time, she’s going to send out a pulsewave strong enough to cause terrible earthquakes. They haven’t been able to get anywhere near her; they don’t know what she wants, how she’s motivated, how to stop her, anything. 

Felicity can’t hack her, Cisco can’t vibe her, their best attempts to spy have determined nothing.

(They even consulted Brie Larson, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, to try to get some insight and if that’s not desperation, Barry doesn’t know what is.)

At this point, their best hope is to try to fight their way into the Queen’s lair and…well, from there, they’re going to need to wing it.

Len and Mick have been told, but they stick around anyway; Len in particular is very protective of his city, and Mick’s not letting Len out of his sight so soon after he got back from the Oculus, and at any rate both of them have been working with Barry on this robot problem for the last two weeks straight. There’s nothing quite like intense life-or-death battles happening on a near-hourly basis to make old resentments melt away and friendships form.

Possibly more than friendships.

Barry hasn’t said anything about it yet, because he’s a coward and after the thing with Iris went south, he’s been scared, and they’ve been busy, and now they’re fighting their way into the big last-ditch apocalyptic battle and he still hasn’t said anything. 

He hasn’t gotten the chance. 

And, when they get to the Queen’s lair and realize how well-armed it is, how well-protected, how everything they’ve fought up to this point has been child’s play in comparison to this, well, Barry suddenly realizes…he never will.

So, like an idiot, he decides now is the time to tell them. Since they’re fighting, the only way to do it is by yelling his love confession in between punching robots. 

“I really -” PUNCH “ - care very much - ” SLAM “ - about you both - ” HEADBUTT “- and I would be honored - ” BAM “ - if you would consider - ” POW “ - maybe -”

“Is now really the time, Scarlet?!” Len shouts back, moving this cold gun from side to side frantically.

“If not now - ” BOOM “ - then when?”

“Let him keep going!” Mick calls.

“I’m trying!” Len shouts. “I’m about to be overcome here -”

“But I’m not done yet!” Barry exclaims, horrified by the thought that he’d never finish the speech he’d worked so diligently on.

Except, just as he says that, all the robots abruptly - freeze.

No, not freeze-with-Len’s-gun sort of freeze, just…freeze. Stop moving. All at once.

And the gigantic carpace of the Queen shifts in her burro beneath the earth, turning and lifting her metallic bug-like head with its large bulbous eyes to gaze upon them, and she opens her gigantic maw and says, “Oh my god! Well? Go on!”

“…what,” Len says flatly. He’s very good at flat.

“He’s proposing!” the Queen gushes. “It’s so cute! I want to see it!”

Barry had not, in fact, been planning on proposing, but as long as the Queen’s attention is diverted, they’re not, you know, dying, so he just…goes with it. He comes up with an impromptu speech which he drag on for as long as he can - citing all the instances he’s ever seen Len and Mick and trying to make it sound super romantic, which honestly he feels he should get an award for because do you know how hard it is to turn “that time you kidnapped my friend to lure me into a battle royale” into a romantic gesture? Really hard, that’s how hard. 

But weirdly enough, it works. The Queen is blubbering by the end of it, happy tears, and she keeps repeating, “It’s so cute! So cute!” 

Apparently, the Queens of the species have so many drones to do things for them because they have too many emotions. They get distracted. 

Somehow they manage to convince her to leave Planet Earth lest she accidentally destroy the beautiful scene, and she takes her drones with her, all but the ones she give them as servants in honor of their impending nuptials. She demands to be invited to the wedding, and they promise they will (with the caveat that engagements can be fairly long).

Afterwards, they look at each other and blink. 

“Did we just save the world?” Len asks. “With feelings?”

“You get used to it,” Mick says. “At least no one turned into a giant stuffed animal this time.”


	36. Coldwave - Survival/Wilderness + Sick/Injured

survival/wilderness fic and sick/injured fic with either coldwave or coldflashwave. 

This fic starts with a plane crash. 

To be fair, Len and Mick were trying to get it to crash; they were being kidnapped by ARGUS and being taken nowhere good to be processed into something called the Suicide Squad (not promising) to be sent on a mission to somewhere call War World (even less promising). That’d been bad enough, but then they overheard people talking about how they could be used to get other people in: Lisa the Golden Glider, the other Rogues, even maybe some of the Legend or the Flash team…

They’d looked at each other and decided “nope, no way in hell” because there’s one thing they’re both agreed on, it’s that they would rather die than let themselves be used to lure other people into servitude. 

After Lewis? Never again.

So they bring the plane down, and that part of the plan works, except now they’re in the middle of goddamn nowhere and Mick’s injured.

Mick, the one they’d kind of both been counting on to get them out of there, because unlike Len he’s actually been out in the wilderness before.

Still, they have their guns (mostly turned off to preserve charge) and they have their brains and damnit they are going to get down this mountain before it kills them, even if Len has to carry Mick the whole way there.

Cue interlude of Mick attempting to teach Len how to forage and failing (“no just because it looks edible doesn’t mean it is, put the mushrooms down”, “no you cannot eat pinecones”, and “if we are going to hunt deer with an inappropriate weapon it’s going to be mine so at least it’s roasted afterwards”), meeting and interacting with various animals, including a friendly bear that adopts them, a sequence involving lots of huddling for warmth (whether or not it’s necessary), and Mick’s fever getting increasingly worse, until they arrive at a village in desperate straits. 

They manage to get medical help, but then it turns into a cat-and-mouse game with ARGUS, who is trying to recapture them before they can alert the Flash or Arrow about it.

(Len and Mick win by turning nature into a giant game of mousetrap to defeat ARGUS’ goons, they get in contact with the Flash for a rescue, ARGUS’ actions are written off as unauthorized, and peace reigns. Also, they take the bear back to Central with them; he’s much happier in the zoo than he ever was back home.)


	37. Babylon 5 - Bester/Garibaldi - Fake Dating + Poorly Timed Confession

YES YOU MAY, I am ALWAYS here to write Bester/Garibaldi. 

So, this is going to happen in the middle of - maybe not the Down Below, maybe this is post-B5, but they’re somewhere and they hate each other. There’s a lot of people around and its a madhouse in there. And Bester starts in on some choice bit of mockery, because he’s an asshole like that, and unfortunately for both of them, it starts off with the words “I must confess”. 

What he says next is lost to the noise.

Neither Bester nor Garibaldi think much of it because the local alien species immediately runs into the place in full force and arrests, well, everybody. But after a few hours of sitting alone in their various brigs cells, each of them having contacted their respective organizations to bail them out, they’re suddenly taken out of their cells and rushed to the main room.

At that point, it’s explained that one of the people in the room was found to have been infected with a particularly nasty sort of space flu that luckily doesn’t impact humans, but as a result of its effects on everyone else, have caused the entire planet to (while they were in the brig) be put under quarantine.

Which means they can’t leave.

Worse, these aliens take quarantine very seriously, so they’re not letting any radio communications in or out either. 

So they have no idea who either Bester or Garibaldi are, and as a result, have no reason to let them go.

“…well that’s a bunch of -” Garibaldi starts, only to be interrupted by a cough. The local aliens explain that it’s okay, since their camera footage suggests that they weren’t instigators of the big fight and since they can’t carry the disease, they will free to go on the (very dangerous) planet as a result of their…circumstances.

Bester goes pale.

Garibaldi, lacking telepathy but knowing Bester, does not like that very much. 

The aliens explain that they saw the beginning of Bester’s love confession (“I must confess” being the beginning of a very traditional speech for this species, and almost never used otherwise) and they’re so very pleased for them. Mating is considered a function of primary importance on this world - a faked confession severely punished, including by death - and because it is so verboten to interfere with the mating process, they are even going to let them go early. Which is great, because otherwise, they would have had to keep them in the cells for the entire 40 days of quarantine.

Neither Garibaldi nor Bester want to spend 40 days in a jail cell.

But is freedom really worth fake-dating…HIM?

(The answer, arrived at after multiple adventures taken together and defending each other and all the huddling for warmth tropes you can possibly want, is yes. Yes it definitely is.)


	38. Coldflash - Bodyguard + Space + Makeovers

Coldflash  
14\. Bodyguard AU  
22\. Space AU  
93\. Makeovers

When Barry finally gets tired – really tired, bone-tired, death-tired – of being a superhero, of all the sacrifices and the loss and the way a brand new problem always shows up on the heels of the last one as if he’s being punished for the sins of a Barry Allen whose mother never died, a Barry Allen that hasn’t existed for a million timeline changes and more, he gives up the title of the Flash to Wally – or to Nora Dawn or Eddie Don, if they’re old enough by then, or maybe even Bart come back from the far future to help – and he just…leaves.

He would take Iris, but she’s gone, a casualty of his endless war to do the right thing at whatever cost to himself (whether she’s dead of enemy attack, the old age that comes upon her but not to him, or even if she just left him for his own good or her own is irrelevant), but he can’t, so he goes alone.

He wanders the world, slowing down (human-speed) to see all the things he never bothered to before. He’s been to Rome a million times to get pizza meant to impress – his favorite take-out places know him by heart – but he’s never bothered to visit the Coliseum or the old Roman forum, and hey, it turns out not all tours are as boring as the one in the Central City Museum, who knew? 

He makes an effort to stay below the radar, but while he might not wear the costume anymore, he might not use the name, but he’s still a speedster and somewhere, very, very deep down in his heart , he’s still the Flash. So he helps out here and there and where he can.

And one day, he finds a ring.

He’s familiar enough with the Green Lanterns – he’s met Hal, he liked Hal, he liked John, he liked Jessica, he even liked Guy, though he didn’t think that much of their successors that came later – that he shies away, initially, not wanting the responsibility of heroism again, but the ring is blue, not green, and he’s drawn to it.

Turns out there’s a shortage of Blue Lanterns in the last few years (decades) and he’s the first one…well, a long while. A LONG while.

The Green Lanterns are determined to protect him, whether he wants to be involved in their intergalactic squabbles or not, and they assign him bodyguards. 

He escapes them, of course. He’s still a speedster.

Len is the thirteen bodyguard they try.

Barry is – speechless.

“Lisa,” he says, a question.

Len looks as tired as Barry used to be, but just as young as the year Barry lost him. “They rescued me from the Oculus,” he says, and that explains why he, like Barry, hasn’t aged. “People died in the process, and that means I owe ‘em. They won’t let me go home till it’s paid.”

(It won’t ever be paid, he means, and Barry understands. Barry understands why Mick stayed with the Legends so long, until the day he found whatever he was looking for out there in space and time, and why he never returned to Central and Keystone and took up the mantle of Kronos again, and look Lisa with him, too, because Len couldn’t come to them, trapped as he was in slavery made to look like a debt of honor, but they could come to him.)

Barry thought all the fight was gone out him, worn out by years of pain and sacrifice grinding him down.

Turns out, all he needed was some really good motivation.

(Insert grand space opera in which the entire Lantern corps has been corrupted and turned into some grand stellar court filled with intrigue, where Barry – the only Hope left – is a much-desired pawn that turns himself into a real player with Len’s help, they go up against betrayal and deception at every turn, fight space battles and assassinations, and eventually Barry and Len take down the whole system that’s been built up in the process and replace it with something new.)


	39. Coldflash - Summer Camp + Dystopia + Second Love

Coldflash

19\. Summer Camp AU  
21\. Dystopian AU  
82\. Second Love

It’s Iris that Barry’s in love with first, of course. He met her at summer camp, his favorite summer camp, and they were childhood sweethearts there. They drifted apart after, all through high school – Barry’s dad never quite forgave Joe for accusing him of attempting to murder Barry’s mom when that home invasion happened, but thank god she woke up out of that coma and set the record straight, explained that there was no domestic violence and also how dare they accuse her husband just because it was easier than doing their job and investigating? – but they’d met again in college and they’d fallen in love again all over again.

Barry thought they were meant to be.

Barry thought they’d be together forever.

He thought –

Lots of things.

Before the world changed.

He and Iris are still technically married, that’s the worst of it; but she’s on the side of the Government and he’s on the side of the Rebellion and there can be no peace between them. She’s still Iris, his beautiful Iris, but Barry’s encouragement to follow her dreams gave her the strength to stand up to her dad and insist on becoming a cop instead of going into journalism the way Joe wanted her to.

Barry wonders, sometimes, if journalism would have taught her empathy with the oppressed instead of solidarity with the oppressors.

It doesn’t matter now, of course; the war came, and the bombs came, and the Rebellion is in pieces and he sees Iris sometimes, wearing her Commissioner stripes proudly as she stands next to the President and the generals and the other Police Commissioners as they explain to the television why yet another regressive, restrictive, fascist measure is necessary to maintain peace.

Barry used to be a runner for the Rebellion, the fastest man they had (or maybe the ninth-fastest, whatever, who’s counting), but he broke his leg and blew his cover to break open a camp filled with migrant children (or those whose skin color was enough to suggest migrancy to the arresting officers, and whose parents didn’t pay enough in bribes to keep them safe) and the Rebellion washed its hands of him.

Well, no, they’d told him to take some time off, to heal, to keep a low profile until the government forgot about him again, but they’d also told him they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything for the kids he’d rescued, so whatever. Fuck them.

Barry took his broken leg and he took the kids and he’d marched them through the woods all the way to his old summer camp because he didn’t know where else to take them and that was the only place he remembered that could possibly hold several hundred kids all at once. 

He didn’t have a plan, he didn’t have food, he didn’t have anything.

All he had were his memories.

Except it turns out the old summer camp, all the way out in that hidden valley he’d loved so much as a kid, wasn’t a summer camp anymore.

Barry wasn’t the only one who remembered the hidden valley, it seems, and the underworld of Central City had congregated in a new place, a robber’s camp filled with thieves and murderers and arsonists and ex-Family men, and they launched their myriad attacks on the city’s wealth from there, and their leader was a man they nicknamed Captain Cold.

He comes to the gate and he hears Barry’s stuttered-out story, told because he can’t march all these kids back the way they came, not without some time to rest, and Barry supposes that this guy has a soft spot for kids or something because he announces that the kids were welcome to stay in the center of the robber camp, junior pirate squad Rogue One or something.

“Really?” Barry asks.

Cold – who Barry would learn very quickly was named Len – just looks at him and says, “Don’t look so pleased; you’re the one who has to take care of them all.”

(Len ends up helping out quite a lot.)


	40. Coldwave - Blind Date + Bodyguard + Curses

Coldwave  
46\. Blind Date  
14\. Bodyguard AU  
98\. Curses

So, Len’s the cursed one. Lewis did something dumb, the fairy was super pissed off, and someone seriously needs to explain to fairies that modern day dads don’t feel the same This Is The Heir To My Property And My Sole Chance Of Establishing A Legacy thing that maybe was a motivating factor in I Curse Your Child curses or whatever, but either way it did shit all in terms of punishing Lewis but is certainly not any good for Len.

Now, a curse would be bad enough, except curses are super rare nowadays, and anything that’s super rare is interesting to the consuming public. 

It’s worse, however, when your curse comes with the standard “True Love’s Kiss” exit strategy.

This is how Len ends up on a reality TV show called “Break Your Curse”, being set up on an endless series of blind dates to try to find The One.

Now, this isn’t that unusual, but Len is charming and charismatic and interesting in a way that many of the other Cursed aren’t, so various clips of him go viral really quickly and suddenly he’s, like, a mini-celebrity.

Mick is hired to be his bodyguard.

Len basically has no job other than going on endless blind dates for the camera, and Mick’s job is to protect him any time he’s not on camera, and they don’t talk much but they do exchange long-suffering looks an awful lot. Len feels weirdly close to this Mick guy, because he’s the only one who doesn’t want anything more from Len than his basic paycheck and maybe for Len not to squeal when he watches his lighter sometimes, which Len isn’t going to do.

Mick’s the only one who’s even slightly sympathetic, too. Everyone else just thinks Len got handed fame and fortune on a silver platter, and how hard is it to go around kissing people anyway.

(Never mind that love doesn’t fucking work that way, and the stupid fairy specified romantic love – otherwise Lisa would do the trick – without every bothering to check if Len was actually capable of romantic love. He’s increasingly sure he isn’t. Maybe he’s aro. Wouldn’t that just be ironic?)

Meanwhile, Len is slowly going stir crazy and eventually he decides that he’s going to go steal something. Anything. He just needs to get out.

Unfortunately, Mick is a very good bodyguard, and Len’s plan to escape his watchful gaze is the only part of his plan that fails.

Except it turns out that Mick doesn’t actually care about theft – he wasn’t hired to police Len’s morality, as far as he’s concerned – and, well.

Len’s not saying no to the opportunity to do this more often.

(The curse is broken in the middle of the night while stealing an unmatched precious diamond, when on the way out of the place Len whooped and grabbed Mick in for a spontaneous kiss. Oh, well.)


	41. Coldwestallenwave - Established Relationship + Time Travel

Coldwestallenwave 

55\. Established Relationship  
97\. Time Travel 

“Okay, we need to put our heads together,” Iris says. “We all agree that Central City’s mayor was not previous a giant snake right out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right?”

“And the chief of the fire department wasn’t a gigantic robot that vaguely resembles Optimus Prime,” Barry adds. 

“And the newscasters weren’t literally Pikachus,” Len agrees.

“I kind of like the waiters in all the restaurants being ninjas,” Mick grumbles. “But yeah, it ain’t normal.”

“So Cisco has rule out weird meta happenings,” Barry says. “Caitlin has vetoed mass hallucination.”

“All we’re left with is time travel,” Iris agrees. She smirks, knowing that she has the upper hand as the only member of their little group that lacked the ability to travel in time. “So. Which one of you time-travelled during the last week?”

Silence.

“Boys.”

Silence. 

“Barry?”

“It was for a good cause! I needed to defeat the meta – I didn’t change anything other than the fight!”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“Hmm. Mick? Did you take the ship?”

“Maybe.”

“Mick.”

“Okay, yeah, I took the Kronos ship. A dinosaur appeared over in Central, one of the Legend things, and I went and fixed it up quick.”

“And –”

“I know my stuff. No new aberrations.”

“Fine. Len?”

“What?” Len asks.

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you use your Oculus powers to time travel in the last week?”

“Sure did.”

“…gonna add anything to that?”

“Like what?”

“Like, I don’t know, WHY you travelled in time?”

Len shrugs. 

“Len…”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Len!”

“The corner shop ran out of raspberry ripple brownies before I got a chance to get one,” Len says. “I had a craving.”

“But that couldn’t be it,” Barry says. “Could it…?”

(Turns out the guy who would have otherwise bought the brownie was a maniac time-traveler who also had a craving. Who knew?)


	42. Mark/Shawna/Barry - Blind Date + Stranded Due to Inclement Weather

Mark/Shawna/Barry

46\. Blind Date  
73\. Stranded Due to Inclement Weather

Given the participants involved, there’s really only one way this could go, in my view.

Barry thought a blind date would be a great idea as a method of getting over his disappointment of things ending with Iris. 

Totally great.

And, yeah, sure, the selected location was a little isolated, but whatever, he’s the Flash, right?

Turns out it was Wolfe. The guy selling metas from Iron Heights, except he’s moved his operation outside and he’s looking for merchandize. 

Barry got cat-fished.

And then he got hand-cuffed.

With meta dampeners.

But it’s okay, he escaped, along with the two prisoners already there, Mark and Shawna.

Except, well, they are pretty isolated, and running around through a forest isn’t really a great idea, and that’s how they end up in a shack in the middle of an unseasonable blizzard.

Mark says “Don’t blame me!” every five minutes.

They keep blaming him anyway.

Shawna regales them with Stories From A Canadian Shack, much to their increasing discomfort.

They ask her to stop.

Barry keeps trying to come up with new ways of escaping, but he’s not dumb enough to go out into a blizzard and neither are they.

In short, they’re stuck there.

Barry struggles with whether or not he should reveal His True Identity when they try to figure out how to take off the meta dampeners, and also to figure out whose should be removed first: Mark, who might get rid of the blizzard but is also a risk for ditching them? Shawna, who can’t go anywhere anyway because she can’t see through the blizzard, but needs her hands free to bandage up their injuries? Or Barry, who refuses to say what his meta power is but could get them all to safety within minutes if he did?

(They end up in bed together three days into the storm. Mark and Shawna agree to tell Barry that they already know who/what he is so that he’ll stop angsting two days after that. They don’t actually get out of the goddamn shack for a full week after their initial escape – good thing it’s well-stocked!)


	43. Barry/All the Rogues - Almost Kiss + Sleep Intimacy

Barry/All Rogues

40\. Almost Kiss – interruption right before they kiss  
95\. Sleep Intimacy 

So I had to look up “almost kiss”, but as soon as I found out what it is, then I knew how I would write this, because there’s really only one way it would go.

The setting: Central City. The Rogues hideway safehouse, hidden away half a universe away by Scudder’s mirrors but accessible through a hundred different nooks and crannies throughout Central to those who know the way.

One of those people?

The Flash.

It started out during a big join-up fight, when there was some world-destroying threat attacking Central and the Rogues weren’t having any of that bullshit, not their city, oh no, and so they were lending their assistance to the Flash (who they very carefully never look at directly when he has his mask off, a surprisingly common occurrence, and they also very carefully never hear any of the names that get tossed around – neither Barry nor Allen nor anything in between those two – and they even more carefully make sure never to notice the fact that Flash HQ is in STAR Labs, because any of that would interfere with the very fun game they have going on with the Flash by making it all too easy to win). 

In this instance, the bad guy was targeting the Flash, so they helped by hiding him out in their safehouse. 

And after that, well, they just all collectively forgot to revoke his approval to get in.

Hey, if the Flash sometimes gets tired of living a double life, of all the pressures of doing all the work, and sometimes he just wants to go somewhere he knows he’s safe to rest, they’re not going to stop him.

They’re certainly not going to do anything that suggests that their safehouse isn’t safe for him. Rogues vs. the Flash is a game, a mutual game, but games like that have no business inside the home – Len would kill them all, after all, and most of them would agree with him. 

After all, there wouldn’t be a game at all if one of them – heaven forbid – actually won.

And besides, the Flash isn’t a good opponent when he’s exhausted or underfed, and they’re going to fix that. Only the best for their superhero.

He sleeps in whatever bed is available, usually with whatever Rogues is available; he’s very warm and cuddly and they have absolutely no objection to taking some time out of their not-particularly-busy days of their lives of crime to hold him and make sure he’s feeling okay.

To put it shortly, it takes some time for them to realize, but they’re all madly in love with him.

At first they fight over it, of course, but after a nice big tussle and several one-on-one fights that the Flash breaks up, unsure of why they’re fighting so viciously, someone (probably Mick) points out that the Flash wouldn’t want them to be fighting each other like this.

Next, they discuss the possibility of competing for his affection, but that just makes everyone depressed because they’re pretty sure Len is his favorite, except for when Mick is cooking.

Len, not wanting to be the leader of a group of depressed Rogues and/or stabbed in the back at first instant (replace stabbed with flamethrowered/lightning striked/mirror gunned/etc.), suggests that they share and share alike.

After all, the Flash has a hell of a metabolism, and none of them are all that young (excluding maybe Axel). If they do ever get him into their bed, there’ll definitely be a need for pinch-hitters if they are to have any hope of exhausting him – just like the way they do their heists, none of which were all that successful until they started teaming up, isn’t that right?

There is agreement.

There is also, after this, an extended period of time in which each of them get very close to kissing the Flash and something happens – either an emergency by a new meta (quickly put down by frustrated Rogues), family events (death glares but no actions), work (the CCPD gets egged), etc. 

Eventually, however, Barry gets the hint, and proves that he can kiss them all senseless in under a minute.

(Len goes first. They all KNEW he was Barry’s favorite!)


	44. Bruce/Lisa - Soulmates + Flirting Under Fire

Bruce/Lisa 

24\. Soulmates  
69\. Flirting Under Fire

It’s Len’s fault.

Many things in Lisa’s adult life are, really (she’s careful not to say ‘most’ and specify ‘adult). 

Either way, this particular thing is Len’s fault very indirectly: he chose to become a supervillain, leading Lisa and Mick to do the same, and also he’s married to Mick, who’s a long-term online buddy of Pam Isley aka Poison Ivy, who upon finding out that they’re supervillains too invited them to come visit Gotham.

Gotham, which is known for its Bats.

Len became very excited once Ivy confirmed that yes, the Bats are more than just an urban legends, and yes, they’re totally human, and he accepted at once.

His excitement, which bewildered Ivy, had nothing to do with any weird obsession with superheroes he has (he denies it, but they all know about that threeway thing he has going with the Flash and Mick) and had everything to do, instead, with the mark on Lisa’s left inner elbow.

Her soulmark. 

A bat, shaped like a domino mask.

(Len’s is a little flame surrounded by a circle of lightning. Mick’s is a snowflake surrounded by the same. They didn’t exactly need a map, did they?)

Either way, she jumps in on a job with Catwoman – she’s heard of Kyle, but they’ve never worked together before – and next thing they know, they’re fielding Bats left and right.

Creepy things, but strangely cute.

Lisa straps on her skates and heads into battle with a grin. 

Cue flirting.

Cue – LOTS of flirting. 

Mostly on Lisa’s part. 

She assumes the younger Robins are out, of course; it’s one of the older ones.

Maybe even –

(She kicks him in the balls with an ice skate. Clearly they’re meant to be.)


	45. Lisa/Jax/Barry - Baby + Roommates

Lisa/Jax/Barry

33\. Baby Fic  
12\. Roommates

So maybe Barry should have, you know, maybe, kinda, sorta paid some more attention to his job than to just the Flash stuff.

It’s just _hard_ , that’s all! Flash stuff is life-or-death!

Work stuff is -

Uh.

Health insurance and rent money and other important things.

Which Barry currently is at risk of not receiving because Captain Singh has finally lost his temper with him.

That, long story short, is why Barry is now on sabbatical and signed up to teach CSI and biochemistry classes at CCU for a semester as part of an exchange program. If he does well at that, Singh will consider letting him back.

Barry is also working, not by his choice, as an RA. 

That means he has to live in the dorms.

He doesn’t like the dorms.

He likes it even less when one of the metas he’s fighting burns part of the dorms down and he suddenly has to take on roommates. (Oh god he’s back in college, shoot him now.)

Except those roommates are…

“You must be kidding me.”

 

Jax is signed up to get his degree at long last. Lisa is back for her masters.

Neither of them is particularly pleased about being put with Barry.

(Lisa finds out about who Barry is about five minutes in because Jax doesn’t realize that Lisa doesn’t know yet and Barry isn’t quick enough to tell him not to mention it.)

They all mutually agree that this situation will be mentioned to No One - not to Team Flash, not to the Legends, and certainly not to the Rogues, currently being led by a very revived Leonard Snart and a very relieved Mick Rory.

It ends up working out, though.

They like each other. 

They fit in well together.

But it’s not until the mysterious time traveler from the future shows up on their doorstep with a baby they have to take care of for a month or two in order to Save The Timeline (while repelling the invaders attempting to kill the baby) that they really start to bond.

(They don’t actually get together until after the baby thing is resolved, though - between classes and baby stuff and Flash/Rogues/Legends stuff, they have not time.)


	46. Sam/Barry/Rosa - Circus + Secret Relationship

18.Circus AU  
54.Secret Relationship 

Okay, kicking it off again! Sam/Barry/Rosa at the circus, huh? Well, obviously what we’re dealing with here is a Rogues circus – Len and Mick own it, Lisa’s a showgirl, and every once in a while they help someone desperate disappear.

Barry Allen is desperate. His mother got killed, his father got blamed, and he got shipped off to live with his best friend and childhood crush, except her dad is the arresting policeman who refused to believe Barry about what he saw that night because he’d decided what the answer was before the investigation ever began.

But, see, Barry could have dealt with that, could have lived with sneaking away to see his dad whenever possible, lived with growing up in Joe West’s house despite all his doubt, lived with studying to become a CSI to prove his father’s innocence in the distant future of his dreams.

But six months in, when Barry was still trying to adjust, his father – who like his son could never step aside when he saw injustice – gets in the middle of a jailhouse fight and ends up dead.

And that? 

That’s the step too far.

Barry runs.

He ends up at the Rogues’ Circus – Lisa found him like she finds all the kids who really need her – and he ends up getting put with the other teenagers, the ones that’ve been there for a few years.

First he’s put to bunk with Hartley, who is his age, but they end up getting into a big fight (Hartley doesn’t understand people actually /liking/ their parents) and Hartley gets put back with Cisco. 

So Barry gets put with Sam, who’s fifteen and not pleased with being bunked with a kid. This in no way stops Barry from idolizing him, and his girlfriend Rosa who bunks with Caitlin. 

Barry follows them around everywhere.

Sam’s learning magician tricks, illusions with mirrors; Rosa’s a twirler, master of dizzying tricks on a rope; and Barry?

Barry’s a clumsy little kid, but he’s surprisingly good at being shot out of a cannon ball.

“Fastest Kid Alive”, Len declares to the roaring crowds, Barry’s name in lights as his natural charming grin wins the audience’s affections, and Len notices his talent with people and takes him to train to be the back-up ringleader.

Sam’s jealous, of course, and angry. There’s a fight. Barry ends up moving out after a while, even ends up going out with Lisa and a secondary circus to do a separate run.

When he comes back some years later, well, he’s grown up.

Sam notices.

Rosa notices.

(They fight like cats and dogs over it, but that’s the way they are together.)

It takes a few more years before they actually stumble together, of course. But afterwards, well – they’re going to be the best damn circus act in the world.


	47. Flashwave - Accidental Marriage + Circus AU

The circus is a lot more popular than I would’ve thought.

We start somewhere in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, where it wasn’t exactly a circus – more of a freakshow. Mick’s their strongman and their fire-breather, a job he rather enjoys. The other freaks cheerfully turn a blind eye to the fact that Mick uses the circus job as a cover for trafficking and fencing stolen goods for his criminal partner Len, mostly because Mick is more than happy to share his cut with them (the corrupt circus owners never need to know), while Len is the least judgmental normie they’ve ever met, always handy with a forgery or a new identity. 

Meanwhile, Barry…

Barry is an idiot. 

He goes bumbling around looking for the answers to a mystery and mostly ends up with debts and trouble and one way or another he finds that he owes the circus owners way more than he can pay back – and they’re not happy. Usually they use this approach to trick people into working for them, interesting people, but Barry interfered with their last few acquisitions in his search for the supernatural and they want him to make it up to them.

But what can they do with a normie?

They come up with an idea: the marriage of the groteseque. .A normie marrying a freak; why not? And just to make sure that Barry couldn’t object on religious grounds, he’s going to be marrying a guy while wearing a dress – that way if the cops or the church finds out, it’s not legitimate anyway.

And if Barry’s going to be in a dress, then who better to marry him to than the big masculine burned strongman?

Barry doesn’t just marry Mick once – he marries him once every evening and twice on Sundays. 

Mick takes pity on poor Barry, offering him a way out, but Barry’s still on the search of his mystery man-in-the-lightning and, honestly, the freakshow is getting him around a lot faster than his job helping out the coppers was. So they end up bunking together as the freakshow travels and, well.

They /are married.

Technically.

(Eventually, they find Eobard is involved with the circus owners, they unmask and disgrace him, and in the resulting chaos Len ends up buying ownership of the freakshow in the resulting bankruptcy, then turns it over to the freaks to run on their own. Len still ends up being ringmaster, much to his bemusement, but it does make the whole fencing/trafficking thing a lot smoother with the whole circus in on it now.)


	48. Coldflash - Bed Sharing + Erotic Dreams

75.Bed Sharing   
88.Erotic Dreams

So this starts with a bad guy laying siege to STAR Labs. 

Not the Rogues, of course, but, like, an actual bad guy. Maybe the Thinker doing something actually clever, or maybe it’s one of Oliver’s villain (they like armies, right?), but either way, Team Flash and a large number of refugees are stuck inside STAR Labs.

Which means, of course, no beds to spare.

As for how Len ended up sharing with Barry, well, they’re the ones most often on the front lines, and that means they get the bed closest to the weakest point in the outside wall. At first, of course, they agree to take shifts, but after the first week that stops being feasible – but by that point there aren’t any other beds.

So, they share.

It’s…uncomfortable, yes, but they’re adults, they can handle it. Despite what romance novels might suggest, two people who are attracted to each other can share a bed without losing control of their facilities – particularly if they’re exhausted.

The bad guy stealing into dreamspace to attack Barry there and accidentally dragging the nearest sleeper (Len) into the dream is an – unexpected complication.

Again, not because of the bed sharing. They’d like to be clear about that.

It just happens that strong emotions are the best way to control dreamspace. The bad guy tries to use fear and anger, of course, pretty classic, and unfortunately Barry is pretty susceptible to those emotions - he might really need to see a shrink properly about that untreated depression, Len has some suggestions for someone who hates shrinks after negative experiences – so the issue is that they need to find something stronger than that.

Anger and fear are pretty fundamental.

Barry, child of nineties cartoons, suggests that love is a more powerful emotion.

Len points out that ‘love’ is extremely abstract and while, in extremis, love can cause feats of amazing ability, it’s not really something you can summon at will. Much less knee-deep instinctive dream-controlling will.

They argue about this for a bit.

The conclusion ends up being that ‘love’ might not do the trick, but ‘lust’ is /extremely distracting.

And, well, they do manage to repel the (suddenly awkward and embarrassed) bad guy, so there’s that!

…the fact that they stay in the dream a good few hours after that is entirely their own business.


	49. Coldwestallen - Circus + Magical Accidents

Another circus! Clearly I’m going to have to be creative. 

In this one, Barry was born into the circus – his father was a knife-thrower, his mother his beautiful assistant (and also the circus’ accountant), his friend-of-the-family uncle Joe the lion-tamer, his best friend Iris helping him as they both train to be acrobats, and a handful of other families. Their circus is a family affair all around, really.

What happens with Barry’s mother is – terrible. 

Rather than trust to the cops, they flee. 

Joe distrust Henry after that, always blaming him for what happened to Nora for all that Henry denies that it was him, and there’s a terrible tension in the circus after that. Still, they’re a family, and family protects family, so they keep going on. The show must go on.

But it’s not the same. 

For one thing, they need to avoid the law more, and that means the circus – once strictly clean – starts flirting with the criminal underworld more than any of them would like, just to survive. Just to have the right papers, the right avoidance, everything.

That’s how, when Barry and Iris are in their early twenties, they meet Len.

Len still thinks of himself as a thief, high-end thief first and foremost, but that thought blinds him to what he’s really good at. But the people around him eventually take notice of his success, and how he manages to achieve that success with whatever crew he chooses to take: a talent for recruitment, for organization, for getting whatever he wants, no matter what that goal is.

The Families made the first play for him, wanting those talents under their control, but Len hates them with a vengeance. That hatred is his first mistake, of course, because when they try to recruit him, he makes a point of beating them back on their own territory in an attempt to tell them to fuck off – but the man who can defeat every Family in the Germ Cities is a man who people want to follow.

 _Lots_ of people. 

The Families have rather worn out their welcome, now that there’s a valid alternative.

Len still thinks of himself as a thief.

But without his intending to, he becomes a king. 

It’s still tenuous, of course, and Len has a weakness for caring for people he decides are his own (Mick started it, he claims, and Mick just smirks) and he needs an extra edge to finally claim the cities as his own.

He doesn’t think he’ll find that edge in a circus. He doesn’t even like circuses: that’s Mick’s thing. But Mick likes this cute little family circus and Len likes to watch the cute little acrobat pair flinging themselves all over the trapeze, so they go whenever they’re in the area and maybe Len finds a little money here and there to help the circus keep going when they’re in a tight spot.

Tumbling (pun intended!) into bed with the acrobats is just a plus.

Barry and Iris enthusiastically agree: they seduced Len into their bed based entirely on a pretty face and a set of terrible puns, and finding out he was the criminal kingpin that was sugar daddying their circus is just icing on top. 

They’re all lying together in bed one night when the Particle Accelerator goes off.

Barry gets superspeed. Iris gets a nose capable of sniffing out lies and truth. 

Len – 

Len gets a circus of superpowered people to help him take over the Gem Cities.

The Families aren’t going to know what hits them.


	50. Coldwest - Flirting Under Fire + Green-Eyed Epiphany + Magical Accidents

69.Flirting Under Fire  
80.Green-Eyed Epiphany   
99.Magical Accidents

I feel like this would probably be a short vignette in the middle of that episode (which I haven’t seen) where there’s a magical (meta) accident and Iris gets Barry’s powers.

Except it carries on for a while, and Len ends up coming to help new-hero Iris fight the bad guys off since everyone else is too busy. He’s a bit worried about it: he likes the indomitable Miss West (she ended up not marrying Barry, to their mutual relief) and he knows very well she’s even more reckless than Barry, who at least has some caution built in from his CSI training. 

After all, Barry waited until he was a superhero with superpowers to go do crazy things.

Iris West routinely went into criminal dens armed only with mace.

So Len bends his full focus on helping and supporting and doesn’t take it as casually as he usually does.

After several fights with Iris getting more and more frustrated, this turns into a gigantic screaming fight in the middle of a battle.

“Why don’t you ever quip with me?” she shouts. “I haven’t even gotten a single cold pun! Do you not think I can handle it?”

Len, attacked from an unexpected angle, tries to lash back, but it turns into a whole thing where Iris admits to being jealous of Len’s rapport (and, more importantly, flirting) with Barry and she’d always imagined it’d be the same in the event that she was a hero, except now she’s a hero and Len is all serious and focus-driven and she thinks it’s because Len doesn’t like her.

Len has to admit that he does like her; in fact, that’s the problem, he likes her a lot and he’s worried she’ll get hurt.

So, she shoots back, he doesn’t think she’s as competent as Barry, huh?

No, just reckless – does she remember the crazy stuff she did pre-powers?!

And that means no flirting?

Oh, he’ll flirt with her. He’ll flirt with her so hard that –

“This is really uncomfortable,” the meta of the week says. “Can I just turn myself into the CCPD now and you guys can maybe do something about this ridiculous UST you have going on?”

“Shut up,” they both say.

(The next few fights are also won by virtue of furious flirting making everyone really uncomfortable, which has Barry saying that he really ought to have thought about that as a valid mechanism for defeating bad guy and asking Mick if he’d be interested in playing wingman for him, and kinda maybe sorta only if Mick is interested, in dating as well. Mick agrees.)


	51. Mick/Eddie/Iris - Circus + Space

MORE circuses. I had no idea they were this popular.

But hey! Space circus! That’s cool: I’d probably spend about three-fourths of the fic coming up with cool space/high-tech circus acts.

But as for the ship – I think this would probably be canon versions of the characters. It’s sometime after the first season, except Eddie didn’t commit suicide in stupid nobility (he tried, missed, and they defeated Eobard anyway, so now Iris is super pissed off at him), and they’re kind of in stasis in terms of their relationship.

They’d had such plans, too – they both agreed that they wanted a third, and they’d been maybe-kinda-sorta thinking about Barry, but Barry’s gone AWOL after the black hole out of sheer guilt and now he seems to have hooked up with _Leonard Snart_ of all people, who has shifted from full villain to anti-hero now that Barry is using his powers to fight the Families rather than just random metas, and Iris can spot a Barry Crush from ten paces (years of experience being the subject of one has taught her well) – but they don’t have someone for that now.

Well, they don’t until Mick Rory shows up.

No, not the present Mick Rory, who is still fighting with Len about being anti-heroes and who is about to go off with the Legends sooner rather than later.

The future Mick Rory, who need their help.

Specifically, he needs a Thawne whose genetic code is up to snuff, and Iris isn’t letting him take Eddie without her, and next thing you know they’re in the middle of a crazy space circus on a wild adventure of the sort right out of their wildest dreams.

With a very attractive quasi-heroic bad-boy time-traveler guide.

Eddie and Iris share a look.

And then they go hunting.

(Mick has experience hunting – but it’s rather nice being the hunted for once.)


	52. Coldwestallen - Proposal + Dance + Chocolate

9.Dance AU  
28.Proposal Fic   
45.Chocolate of Romance 

Interesting combination! I think in this one, Barry and Iris are up and coming dancers – ballet, perhaps, or some other sort of dance troupe – and Len is, hmm, I’m going to make Len a famous photographer. He does both art photography, where he makes most of his money, and sometimes freelances for magazines because he gets bored without new stimulation. 

They meet in one of these magazine jobs. Len bitched a lot of about being sent to cover this dance group, but then he becomes obsessed with the way these dancers move, the control over their bodies, the images he can capture with them.

They’re his muses.

They’re also, after they realize that he would be interested in them but doesn’t want to pressure them (which they think is stupid because they want him without any sense of coercion), his lovers.

I feel like I would have to add some plot here – maybe an evil attempt to destroy the dance troupe, maybe an attempt to sabotage Len’s career, maybe even an insidious attempt to destroy their relationship by suggesting that they’re using Len for their careers and Len is only using them to boost his own – but in the end it would probably be the three of them, having succeeded in beating back everyone who disapproves of their relationships, having convinced Joe to back off and Lisa that Iris and Barry aren’t gold-diggers and Wally that Len isn’t abusing Iris and Mick that Iris and Barry aren’t going to break Len’s heart and just about everyone else that YES they are SERIOUS about this, and they’re all curled together in bed and laughing about it in sheer relief.

They _won_.

They _made it_.

And that’s when Len reaches down to the side of the bed and grabs a chocolate box and hands it to them, and they laugh because it’s a Valentine’s Day box but it’s already mid-summer, the box must be months old by now, but chocolate doesn’t go bad that quickly so they open it and inside there are rings.

Also chocolate, but mostly rings.

They say yes.


	53. Savitar/Felicity/Mick - Marriage of Convenience + Bathtub

35.Bathtub Fic  
52.Marriage of Convenience

Hmmm. You know, I was going to do something with Savitar needed to be kept from hurting people after the events of the season or something like that, going with a marriage of convenience sort of thing that way, but then I had this glorious image of Savitar as some mix of Rochester and Heathcliff, brooding alone in his giant house on the moors (possibly after a terrible tragedy, possibly because he feels Wronged, whatever) and it’s going to be some sort of Secret Garden-Jane Eyre-esque dramatic Romance /thing.

Felicity is going to be the teacher who had a romance with a dashing suitor (Oliver) only for it to go horribly wrong shortly before their marriage, leaving her high and dry and disgraced. Possibly Oliver’s involvement in extremely illegal vigilantism is discovered and he gets sent to prison; either way, Felicity’s dream-come-true is suddenly turned tragic. 

So she looks for a job out in the middle of nowhere. I keep thinking governess, but Savitar doesn’t have kids – his non-disfigured twin brother Barry has kids with the Love Of Both Of Their Lives, Iris Allen neé West, and Savitar’s jealous, of course – but maybe at this point the best she can do is housekeeper, and out in the middle of nowhere is perfect for her mood right now. 

The thing is, though, is that she can’t FIND work – not legitimately.

No, what she finds is a husband. 

Savitar needs to get married to ensure he keeps his inheritance (he’s the older brother, but there’s a clause about getting married in the will) and he has his people interview Felicity as a housekeeper (he’s watching from another room, afraid to show his scarred face) and decides she’s good enough, so he has his people offer her the job conditioned on marriage. He won’t touch her, of course, but the marriage has to happen.

Felicity agrees.

They marry by proxy.

When she gets to the house out in the moors, she meets two men: the enigmatic and brooding Savitar, the rich but tragically scarred house-owner, yes, but she also meets the strong and gruff but secretly shy gardener, Mick, who doubles as Savitar’s valet, cook, and all-around caretaker. Savitar hired Mick as a joke, since obviously no one would hire a big bruiser thug of a released convict as a /valet, heaven forbid, but Mick turned out to be good with plants and a half decent cook and, well, he knows how and when to shut up, so Savitar sort of…get used to him. It’s weird not having him around, and anyway, given that most people don’t want to come out all the way to the moors, it makes sense to just have one guy to do just about all the jobs necessary rather than having a whole staff of people who will just irritate Savitar. 

Except the one thing neither Savitar nor Mick can do is clean, and so enters housekeeper-slash-wife Felicity.

Insert here the traditional slow-burn romance, where she gets to know both of them and they’re initially put off by how damn /chatty Felicity is but in time she starts to fill the empty places in the house that have been empty ever since Barry and Iris and their family moved out following Barry and Savitar’s great big fight over Iris when Barry accused Savitar of creeping on his wife and Savitar accused Barry of letting his wife try to take over his (HIS, he emphasizes, because Savitar’s the older brother) house and both of them haven’t spoken since. Barry and Iris live in the townhouse and Savitar lives in the city and that’s that.

Of course, Savitar’s been in this whole three-way-love-triangle before, and he lost, so he has all sorts of issues, and when he notices that Felicity seems to like Mick he basically gives up all hope and tries to back off.

Mick basically ends up marching up to Savitar while Savitar is in the bath (where social conventions ensure that Savitar can’t run away because that would involve getting out of said bath and retreating through the hallways naked when there’s a woman/wife in the house) and – in an uncharacteristic burst of eloquence – he tells him that he likes Savitar, that Savitar saved him after he lost Len after they’d been split up in prison and with Len Mick had lost all hope and purpose, and that Mick’s not giving up Savitar for anyone, no one, and he’d better damn well get it through his head. 

Then he kisses Savitar, who is totally taken aback because he _never realized_ that Mick wanted him, even though he’s always rather enjoyed Mick as eye candy and as a faithful companion.

And then Felicity, who is eavesdropping, bursts in and explains how she wants them both, but only if they’ll both have her because she wouldn’t get between them, and, well, life goes on, but now they’re together (albeit moving at a glacial slowness that suits all three of them with their issues, the occasional three-person baths in the gigantic bathtub aside). That’s that. 

At least, that’s that until the past catches up with them and tries to tear them apart: Oliver gets out of prison, declaring himself wrongly accused, and comes up north to retrieve his former fiancée, and Barry ends up reaching out back to Savitar because he needs help in rescuing a person from prison and it turns out that person is Mick’s old beloved Len, and it’s a giant mess.

Cue extreme amounts of drama and angst and Romantic tropes, but a happy ending where Savitar and Felicity and Mick reaffirm their relationship, including Savitar and Felicity getting married For Real This Time, and Len joins Barry and Iris in their townhouse, the relationship between Savitar and Barry is repaired, and Oliver goes away and leaves them alone or possibly dies dramatically. (Someone has to be the villain, okay? It’s a Romance novel!)


	54. Coldwave - Mutual Pining + Erotic Dreams

Okay, with this combination, the fic would probably be smut. Mutual pining is practically _de rigueur_ for early Coldwave, of course – it’s not easy for people as untrusting and paranoid as Len and Mick to fall in love, much less actually tell someone about their love. And when they’re basically each other’s only friend, and there’s a better-than-average risk of a homophobic response leading to being rejected forever? Yeah. It’s a miracle they ever get together.

So this would be set when they’re in their late teens, early twenties. Their libidos are overactive and their wallets are basically empty and they’re doing a _proper_ casing of this one place, meaning months of watching, and that means they’re in a crappy apartment overlooking the place they’re casing except they don’t have anything there but a single mattress.

Which they share.

Now, they’re good friends. They’ve been in prison together. They’re young and they have needs. 

If they weren’t so attracted to each other, they would totally be able to work out a system where each person gets time to jerk off and get it out of their system without bothering each other.

But they are so attracted to each other.

If they jerk off, they might accidentally let a certain name slip, and that would of course be disaster.

Which means that they…don’t. 

Cue the return of a wet dreams.

For both of them.

(Insert extensive description of Len’s dream, of Mick’s dream, and of the one dream that they both share – whether just because they think alike or because they have a mental link, pick your poison – and finally of the time when they wake up with each other’s names on their lips and there is the big revelation where they both think the other one is going to reject them and pre-emptively move to try to admit guilt and run, only to realize that if they’re both admitting guilt than that means they’re both attracted, and then they get together.)


	55. Coldflashwave - Magical Accidents + Kink + Fairy Tale

99.Magical Accidents  
92.Kink  
25.Fairy Tale AU

Okay, this trio of prompts clearly means that there need to be a kinky fairy tale. Helpfully, the prompt doesn’t specify what kink (thanks, meme!), but let’s see, what’s a good fairy tale for these three?

Honestly, they could fit in anywhere, but I’m going to go with Red Riding Barry.

Barry is in fact canon Barry, but he was fighting a magic-user alongside Constantine and something goes wrong and his soul is torn out of his body and thrown into the wildness of the astral plane.

The astral plane is not a good place to be.

He ends up fleeing from the vicious creatures lurking there, dream-eaters and soul-stealers and the like, and he ends up lost in the Dreamwoods, desperately following the paths to try to get back to his body and to his freedom, and while he’s in the Dreamwoods he finds…

The Wolf.

A wolf – werewolf, really – made of ice, fur sharp and shark and icy but for the soft ruff around his neck, with shining blue eyes and a brilliant mind.

A wolf that Barry recognizes as Leonard Snart.

He’s been trapped in the astral plane after the Oculus explosion; to protect himself, he took on the attribute of the Wolf, the vicious but ultimately doomed role that offers protection only until the story is over, and now he and Barry are trapped in the story: the Wolf offering temptation, the person in Red succumbing, and ultimately death and destruction.

Len has been scaring away the Reds who have ventured nearby so far, keeping them on the path and keeping them from the story, but this Red? _His_ Red?

They both succumb to temptation.

Len resumes his human shape and he takes Barry back to the cottage in the woods and he ties him up in the bed that represents safety and he opens up his big wide jaws and swallows Barry right up as many times as Barry can tolerate, which is quite a lot. 

But every story has an end, and their end is coming.

The Hunter is coming.

Back in the real world, Constantine has been desperately trying to send someone into the Dreamwoods to rescue Barry’s soul before someone or something else possesses the speedster’s body, but no one can get in unless they fit into the story. No one seems to. No one…

Until they try to send Mick.

Mick, after his experience as Kronos, fits into the story Len and Barry have become trapped into: he is the Hunter, a wolf who was captured by his masters to go after the other wolves, and he takes his axe (pulse rifle) and he goes to rescue Barry-who-is-Red from whatever harm that threatens him.

Except this Hunter has already tried to turn his axe against the Wolf once before, and failed, and now that the Oculus is destroyed there is just a little window open for free will, for another path.

This time, the Hunter uses his axe to hack down the ropes that bind Red to the bed (Barry pouts) and he uses those ropes to capture the Wolf (Barry stops pouting) and he takes them both as his own prisoners instead of killing one or the other, dragging them both all the way back down the road out of the Dreamwoods, fighting off all manner of other creatures who have a vested interest in ensuring that the Red story is not subverted, that no Wolf actually _wins_.

But together, they manage it.

(And then they wake up in the real world, Len is revived, he and Mick go home – and then Barry shows up at their doorstep with some rope and a hopeful expression, and gets invited in to stay.)


	56. ColdFlash - Space + Performer + Accidentally Married

22.Space AU   
23.Performer AU  
51.Accidentally Married

So, in this one, I think Len’s the star. Totally accidentally, mind you; a very select group of humanity was sent out among the stars to be first contact with the newly discovered Galactic Federation, and Len and Mick and Lisa were not supposed to be on it but smuggled themselves on anyway because they’re idiots that thought a possibly one-way-trip to get away from Earth sounded great except they’re very good at being idiots so they actually succeeded at it.

And then it turns out that aliens have a great appreciation for slight of hand and exquisite theft ability, so after Len steals the Unstealable Jewels of Tmizarin (he couldn’t resist: they were literally named “the unstealable”!) right out from under everyone’s noses, he suddenly becomes a celebrity.

A real celebrity, too, not just a “hey look new species” novelty, especially when they present Len with challenge after challenge and he keeps meeting them and they adore him unreasonably.

The humans - diplomats and scientists and poet laureates - are not as impressed. 

Most of them refuse to have anything to do with Len, actually, all except for one enterprising xenobiologist named Barry who really wants to learn about the aliens and is both just ruthless enough to leverage Len’s fame to get the access he wants and just naive enough to simply ask Len to help him with this plan.

Luckily for Barry, Len thinks ruthless and naive is an adorable combination, so he signs Barry up as part of his retinue, alongside his agent (Lisa’s job) and bodyguard (Mick’s job) and Barry gets all the access his scientific little heart desires, and all at the cost of hanging out with Len and helping him with his heists.

A burden that Barry is really starting not to mind at all.

And then it turns out that the aliens believe that the only possible position left over after agent and bodyguard is taken is, well, spouse.

Barry sure as hell isn’t giving up his access, so…

Hi, husband?

(Len doesn’t mind at all. If anything, he’s wondering what the hell he did for such repeatedly good karma…)


	57. Coldflash - Fairy Tale + Arranged Marriage + Scars

25.Fairy Tale AU  
50.Arranged Marriage   
96.Scars

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful air spirit who was the fastest of them all, running so fast that lightning itself flickered at his heels and whose dances through the air were widely considered the finest in all the land.

His name was Barry, and he was happy, but another air spirit, a spirit of the bullying northern wind named Eobard, was jealous that everyone so admired Barry’s dancing when his own (which was in fact rather poor and derivative of others) was, in his opinion, unfairly overlooked.

Now, no air spirit may raise a hand to another without turning the ire of Aeolus, the god of the winds and master of the speed force, upon them, so Eobard hatched instead a plan to ensure Barry’s demise. 

He knew of Barry’s longtime fondness for a human girl, a princess of the West named Iris, with whom he liked to dance as an invisible gust of wind, and he lured Barry time and time again to look upon her as she traveled through her country. He began to tell tales - for Eobard was very good at telling tales - of love, of romance, of sacrifice, until poor Barry was utterly convinced that he was in love with Iris, and moreover that he would do anything, anything, to be with her, as an air spirit and human never could.

And when he confessed this to Eobard, who he considered a mentor and a friend, Eobard did not cease his plotting but instead smiled in victory: he told Barry of a witch of the wind, called Zoom by those that knew of him, and that this Zoom could help one who was desperate - for a price.

Barry, convinced of his love, went to Zoom and asked to be made human, so that he and his Iris could be together.

Zoom agreed to grant Barry’s wish, but at a terrible price: he carved away Barry’s wonderful dancing legs, and gave him legs of clay instead to anchor him to the ground, and more than that, he warned Barry that if he did not win true love’s kiss from a human within three turns of the seasons, his clay legs would sink him and he would be dragged down beneath the earth forever.

Barry was stricken, for he thought of his dancing as the worthiest part of him, but, convinced of his love and thinking of Eobard’s stories of sacrifice, accepted this bargain, even though his feet became terribly scarred and pained him every step he took. 

But Iris did not love him, not the way he thought he loved her: Barry was her dear friend, her companion from childhood, as close as a brother, and she would do whatever she could to save him from the terrible fate that awaited him, but her true love’s kiss was reserved for her fiancé, Eddie Thawne of the northern kingdom, whom she adored.

(And when Barry heard the name, he covered his face and knew himself to be betrayed: for Eobard had the especial duty to protect the Thawne family, and there was no way he did not know of this match.)

In desperation to save Barry, Iris adopts him as a brother in truth and sends out a call to all the nations around her that her kingdom would honor any allegiance that was sealed by marriage to Barry, for, as she explained to Barry, humans took their oaths of marriage seriously (well, most of the time) and there was a chance, however slight, that it would be enough - that the one chosen to marry Barry would make themselves love him in truth, and so save his life.

But Zoom did not wish for this plan to succeed, and he told Eobard, and when Eobard heard of this plot, he was wroth with anger (for now the air spirits spoke of nothing but how beautiful Barry’s dancing /had been, and what a loss it was to have lost him to love) and was determined to finish Barry for good, and so he whispered into the ears of the Thawnes until they - all unknowing - decided to strengthen the West kingdom’s offer by offering an alliance of their own as well, for they knew that their kingdom and the West’s would become one soon enough. 

And where before Barry might have gotten away with a marriage to a small principality or noble house grateful for the honor, the eligible man or maid so relieved by their good fortune in finding a kind spouse that they were willing to fall in love, the proffered alliegence so strenghtend was too much to resist, and an offer came in from the king of the frozen heart of their land, Leonard Snart of Central, whose heart was infamously as cold as his country.

“Not him!” Iris cried, but there was nothing to be done: they could not refuse his offer without the threat of a war that would destroy them.

“It’s okay,” Barry told her, for he did love her true even if she did not love him. “I will still agree to marry him, even if it means that I die for lack of true love’s kiss.”

And so the alliance is signed and Barry sent far from the western kingdom to live out his last days in the frozen lands of Central in preparation for a wedding that would be his doom, for they could not reveal the truth without inciting the very war they wished to avoid.

At first, Barry’s husband-to-be is as cold as his reputation, indifferent to Barry as anything more than a pawn in the endless diplomatic games played by the kingdoms of the corners, but then one day he came up by surprise and caught Barry speaking words of encouragement to his sister, Lisa; telling her that her ice-skating was beautiful, that she danced on the ice the way the air-spirits danced in the air, and that she should not put aside things that give her joy because of duty - not even if she thought it was Len wanted.

“What do you know of dancing?” Lisa sneered, eyes cutting to the wheelchair that Barry used now.

“I used to dance, once,” Barry said, and his tone convinced her to try once more.

Len loved nothing more than the joy in his sister’s eyes after she danced on the ice, and after that he began to pay attention to Barry.

And, little by little, the iciness of Len’s heart melts, and Barry finds within his heart a love that he had not before thought possible - a slow love, a small flicker that grew inch by inch instead of a roaring flame that consumed itself in an instant of passion. But Barry still cannot tell Len the truth: that he is an air spirit, a dancer, and that he will soon die because a slow love is more valuable to him than gold, but with Zoom’s limit it is not enough.

Right?

But Eobard and Zoom see that love, and they are afraid, for if Barry wins his kiss than he will not die, and if he does not die then Zoom’s spell will be lifted and Aeolus, the Speed Force, will come to bless his wedding and in so doing discover what they have done. So they whip up strife within the central lands, casting the blame on Barry, and ultimately, when even that fails, they reveal to Len that his would-be bride is not even human - and not planning to go through with the marriage.

Len is heartbroken, because he knows only that Barry was seeking a second-best alternative to Iris, and not that Barry is doomed to die; and Barry, distraught to realize that he has in truth been the cause of all the trouble and also knowing that the kernel of love is not the same as true love, tries to flee.

But Len doesn’t let him: “We will postpone the wedding,” he tells Barry when he catches him, for his right hand Mick is the finest Hunter in all the lands, “until you love me in truth.”

“Then it won’t matter,” Barry confesses sadly, “for I will not live past three turnings of the season.”

“What season?” Mick grunts. “This here’s frozen Central, not your temperate West climate. We’ve not got seasons: we’ve just got winter, and it doesn’t turn, not here on top of the world.”

Barry stares at him, and Len stares at him, and suddenly they are both laughing, and all the howling of the northern wind around them cannot stop their joy.

It takes them two years, all told, but Len takes Barry before him under the canopy and looks him in the eye and pledges his love, his true love, and when he kisses Barry, the spell on him breaks and Aeolus appears in a whirl of light to give his blessings to his child. 

Barry’s clay legs crack open to reveal the legs of air hidden within. The scars are still there, and Barry still cannot walk on the earth without pain, but Aeolus’ blessing is this: that Barry can this one time dance in the air for his true love.

Barry dances as he has never danced before, lightning and light itself dancing with him, and the legions of the air are mute with sheer rapture for it. 

But at the end Len, who was really never much one for dance, says only, “I’d rather dance with you in your wheelchair than to sit back and watch you dance alone.”

(And Aeolus’ blessing is this: that Barry, who valued himself for his dancing and thought himself worthless without it, know at last that he is loved in truth for who he is and not for what he can do.)

And as for Eobard and Zoom?

Well.

Aeolus punished them, in such a means and ways that they in fact come up again when Princess Iris’ brother Wally sets out upon his own quest -

But that’s a different story.


	58. Coldflashwave - Space + Circus + Accidentally Married

18.Circus AU  
22.Space AU  
51.Accidentally Married

Barry Allen is twenty-four years old and he has achieved all his dreams.

Well, most. 

Sort of.

Okay, not at all.

He became a CSI, check. 

He reprocessed his dad’s case and found evidence that he was innocent, check.

He found and imprisoned the man who had really done it, a serial killer masquerading as a professor of criminal science (and advisor and consulting expert to the police!), Harrison Wells, who proudly confessed to having framed numerous people for his own crimes. 

The fact that Wells also went out of his way to mentor Barry personally while he was in college, becoming almost like a second father to him, is just…an extra bit of fucked up.

As is the fact that due to Barry’s discovery, all of the cops involved in any of Wells’ cases are under investigation, including Joe West, the man who adopted and raised Barry. Meaning that Barry’s actions are directly responsible for Joe being put under suspension without pay and possibly for him going to prison if the investigators find out about some, in Joe’s words, “small and irrelevant” corners he’d cut.

Barry hadn’t intended that at all.

The investigators had also turned up evidence of Joe’s supposedly dead wife, and Barry’s best friend’s Iris’ mother, being alive, albeit dying, and that in turn had both cracked his budding relationship with his new girlfriend Camille (the DA now recused from investigating him and potentially even under suspicion herself) and fucked up his relationship with Iris.

Iris was also not speaking with Barry, possibly permanently, because his efforts to rescue his father from wrongful imprisonment for the murder of his mother, the event that ruined Barry’s life, had led to the destruction of her own life. She was considering leaving journalism, which she loved, and entering law with the hope of defending her dad from the charges - she termed it “witch hunt” - brought against him and others like him.

It wasn’t _rational_ for her to blame Barry, but he understands.

Oh, how he understands: his father was free less than a week before a distraught wife of one of the cops now under investigation ran him down with her car, and now she’s going to prison, too.

So here he is: his childhood dream fulfilled, and only at the cost of everything he holds dear.

…yay.

So maybe it’s not really a surprise that Barry ran away and got totally shitfaced in Las Vegas. 

Or that he was drunk enough that spilling his whole miserable life story to two very handsome, very sympathetic, and also very drunk men in one of the bars in Vegas. 

Or that he ended up partying with them the rest of the night.

Or, even, that he woke up in bed with them with a goddamn ring on his finger that matched the identical ones on theirs, and a marriage certificate with such blurred signatures that none of them can figure out which one of them Barry is married to.

It _is_ a surprise when Len and Mick, glancing at each other, decide to extend an invitation for Barry to come home with them, since they recalled from his story that he had nothing to go home to himself.

…it is even _more_ of a surprise when he accepts.

But that’s not as much of a surprise as finding out that Len and Mick are _freaking aliens_ on temporary shore leave from their day jobs in a traveling _space circus_ that also doubles as a cover for a group of thieves.

Barry’s CSI skills are now repurposed to _hide_ crimes, but honestly, at this point, Barry’s lost faith in the criminal justice system anyway so why not? He works as “the fastest man” in the circus as a cover, enabled by accelerating boots Len stole in an earlier heist, and his good nature, kindness, and good-humored willingness to laugh at himself soon makes him one of the favorite acts. 

As for his relationship with Len and Mick?

Well, as far as they’re concerned, they stole him fair and square, and what they steal they keep.

(In time they come back to Earth, where Barry finds out that Joe didn’t get sent to prison and both he and Iris are deeply apologetic for their behavior and all that, which he appreciates but he’s not coming back. He does give them tickets to see his show, though, which they are very impressed by - especially when Iris wanders out of bounds and finds out about the whole alien thing…)


	59. Savitar/Lisa/Barry - Dance of Romance + Accidentally Married

43.Dance of Romance   
51.Accidentally Married

Okay, for some reason I’m imagining Savitar and Barry as twins, both dancers, and I have an image of them dancing a sexy jealousy tango-ballet routine with Lisa in the middle as the love interest.

Them being twins was always their shtick ever since they were kids - perfect copies of each other moving in perfect mirrored time - and after Savitar’s car accident that left his face horribly burned on one side (but thank god didn’t affect his legs or balance), they kept it up, with Savitar playing the evil twin more often than not. 

It causes some tension - where before they could swap roles, no one knowing better, now they’re recognizable, and in most dance roles the villain is done by a less talented dancer, giving Savitar a stain on his reputation despite the fact that he and Barry are equally talented - and they’ve never really worked well with anyone after the accident.

At least, until they meet Lisa.

They are fully prepared to hate working with her: the Golden Gilder, infamous as a diva well aware of the fact that she’s known as the finest dancer of her generation.

Except she is the finest dancer of her generation, and more than that, she’s from Central City, like them, which they didn’t know, and she greets them as compatriots. She works hard and she plays hard and she coaxes finer performances out of them than they even knew they were capable of. She forces directors to give them roles that are worthy of them, of both of them, and their reputation soars.

Sure, she’s a diva. But she’s magnificent, and that makes up for it.

Really, it’s almost not a surprise when she falls into bed with them.

(It is a bit of a surprise that she picks Savitar first, but Barry is delighted by Savitar getting the respect he deserves.)

Even her brother Len and his partner Mick - they gave Lisa her start, and visit often - approve of them.

They even drag the lot of them with them to the local Pride parade, where Lisa and Barry and Savitar all hurt their wrists signing autographs - and petitions - and congratulations cards - and really any piece of paper put in front of them, they stopped paying attention after a while.

Including, as they belatedly discover, a marriage certificate by someone who was Definitely Not Dressed Appropriately but who was doing quickie marriages regardless - Lisa signed on one side, and Savitar and Barry squeezed their signatures in on the other, which is technically illegal but is in no way stopping Lisa from changing her last name to Allen and enjoying her new married status tremendously.

(The media is in a frenzy for months trying to figure out which Allen she married. Eventually they tell them it’s Savitar, but between the three of them, they don’t really care.)


	60. Westwave - Awful First Meeting + Big Damn Kiss + Mutual Pining

56.Awful First Meeting  
42.The Big Damn Kiss  
53.Mutual Pining

Oh, man, I’m torn. I’m so torn. So many interesting Mick pairings, and these prompts would work for any of them.

Let's go with Mick and Iris.

Interestingly enough, I don’t actually think they’ve actually met in canon - she wasn’t in on the Flash thing when they were first active in season 1; she didn’t appear anywhere Mick was in the Dominators crossover in season 2; and while he attended the wedding in season 3, she was a little bit busy being a bride and, you know, Nazis.

So they meet after all that.

Specifically, they meet in the middle of Iris’ divorce.

Oh, she and Barry still love each other, but, well, they’ve made a go of it for five years of increasingly traumatic adventures and suffering and alternate universe and crazy. The breaking point was when Iris got pregnant with what they thought would be Nora, who they’ve met and love already, and then she lost the pregnancy in yet another time-travel twist where it turns out Nora is actually the biological daughter of Barry and Jessica Cruz, a Green Lantern that Barry’s been working closely with in his intergalactic adventures recently and wow, open marriage or not, is that the worst way to find out that your husband has been having an affair or what?

(Barry manages to one-up himself when he gets stuck in a Speed Force loop and comes out after what he perceived as three years but was for everyone about three days dating Leonard Snart, much to Jessica’s annoyance. Of course, shortly after that Jessica decides to accept a Green Lantern posting exploring deep space and transfers full custody of little Nora to Barry and Len, who move in with Mick and Iris, so little Nora ends up growing up calling Iris ‘Mom’ anyway, but Iris doesn’t know any of that at the time of the divorce.)

Anyway, so Iris’ first meeting with Mick Rory is during a particularly nasty point in the divorce where he literally picks her up and walks out of the room with her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, which at the time she saw as a mortal insult and only a few months later understood to be an attempt to help her avoid melting down in public.

Either way, she bears a bit of a grudge right up until the incident where Barry reappears, Len in tow, and Mick marches up to them and punches them both - Len for sacrificing himself and leaving Mick to be a hero, and Barry for being a dick to Iris during the divorce. (He hadn’t seen any reason for them to divorce and he’d spent a lot of time sulking and being unhelpful.) Iris, who’d never gotten a chance to properly punch Barry herself, approved entirely.

When Mick finished announcing this, Barry started spluttering about how Mick wasn’t allowed to punch him on Iris’ behalf because he barely even knew her, and that’s when Mick swept Iris into his arms, declared that they were dating and laid a big one on her.

Iris, who unlike Barry hadn’t really dated since the divorce, was more than happy to play along, mostly because it took Barry several months to figure out that they were bluffing (the fastest man alive, ladies and gents), despite literally everyone else figuring it out within minutes.

Still, Iris is pissed about the divorce, so she keeps up the façade, and Mick is more than willing to play along.

…except for the fact that somewhere in those few months, it stops being entirely playing and starts being pining.

Oops.

It all culminates in a confession on a sparkling firework-lit evening in July and a kiss that was interrupted by Barry shouting “Stop that! I’ve already figured out that you’re not really dating!” and then having to explain to him that no, now they are dating, and confusing him even further. Apparently time travel he can handle, but interpersonal drama? Nope.

(and then they all move in together and raise little Nora alongside Don and Dawn, the kids she carries for Barry and Len, and Tess, her daughter with Mick, named after Mick’s mother - and that’s before Lisa moves in next door with Cisco and their own growing brood…)


	61. Lisa/Rosa/Shawna - Performer + Soulmate + Royal

23.Performer AU   
24.Soulmate AU  
2.Royal AU

Lisa and Rosa met when Lisa was still grifting with Len and Rosa was still dating Sam and Len and Sam had joined up together to do a heist, and they fell immediately and ridiculously in love.

Ridiculously, because Rosa is still with Sam (though he’s all for her getting with Lisa, presumably in the hope of eventually getting to watch or join in or even just daydream about it) and she refuses to leave him no matter how much Lisa wants to run away with her. Sam helped her out of the gutter; Rosa feels like she can’t abandon him, not even for what she thinks might very well be her soulmate.

Well, one of them: she has a triad mark, and Lisa does too, and neither will activate without the presence of their third.

And hey, Rosa doesn’t need to worry about it, because being soulmates means they’ll make it somehow, right? Right?

But being Rosa’s piece on the side isn’t enough for Lisa and Len hates seeing Lisa upset, so he pulls a heist for the ages and keeps the lion’s share for himself (which creates a permanent breach with Sam, even though they’d agreed in advance that Len would take the risk and keep the reward) and he takes Lisa away before Rosa even knows it’s happening.

The next time Rosa sees Lisa, it’s been five years and Lisa’s the star figure skater for the upcoming Olympic Games. Her face and name are everywhere.

Rosa misses her like a stabbing wound that’s only gotten worse, and she realizes that being grateful to Sam isn’t enough for her anymore. She breaks up with him, terrified that he’ll fall apart, and then he…doesn’t. He’s fine. He has other women, always has, and he doesn’t actually /need Rosa the way, say, Len needs Mick. 

Or the way, Rosa realizes, that Lisa needed her.

Clearly it’s time for Rosa to win her Lisa back.

She doesn’t bother her during the Games, hoping that all the fame will die down after, but Lisa wins gold, the Golden Glider, and parlays that fame into a role in a film that ends up being a surprise hit, and from there she gets another role, and another, and suddenly she’s a movie star.

Worse, a movie star who keeps being seen in public with Shawna Baez, the real-life Cinderella story who was born and raised in the poorer parts of Keystone, just like Lisa and Rosa in the Central slums but not quite as criminal, and only when her far-away cousins died did she discover that her inheritance included a near-royal title from a distant country.

But Rosa’s not going to let that stand in her way. She makes her way to where Lisa is and she breaks in and she confesses - everything. How she still loves Lisa and she made the wrong choice back then and how she doesn’t want to ruin Lisa’s brand new life but she can’t stay away - not unless Lisa really wants her to go.

And then Lisa pulls her in for a kiss, and then Shawna walks into the room and Rosa wants to send her away but then Lisa is showing her her wrist and their soulmark is changing and -

Oh.

All the puzzle pieces are in place.

Soulmates.

But Rosa’s not going to make the same mistake of assuming that being soulmates is enough, no. It’s going to be tough: Rosa’s still a thief, and Lisa’s got her budding movie star career, and Shawna has her weird noble title obligations and they might’ve been raised the same but their lives are so different now. 

But Rosa’s going to fight for it, this time, and so are they.

(and then they live happily ever after)


	62. Flashwave - Royal + Fake Married

You know what, I’m going to take a broad view of this one. Mick Rory is still Mick Rory: arsonist, criminal, supervillain, Legend. Well, former Legend - the influx of magic into the world has caused so much trouble that Mick has permanently transferred back to Central City to help fight it, because the Legends have observed that he’s absolutely magnificent at it. He can literally punch demons out of existence (Constantine tears his hair out about how), his heat gun is strong enough to scare off wraiths and ghouls, and the two dragons they encountered as ravaging the countryside? His beloved and faithful pets.

No one knows why, just that he’s incredibly good at it.

It means he works with Barry more and more, and they start to like each other as they do, but they haven’t quite moved from liking to actually dating when a giant portal rips open and Leonard Snart runs back into existence with a giant rock rolling to a stop behind him.

“It’s following me,” Len explains, sounding somewhat harassed and not nearly as perturbed as everyone feels he should be by a missing few years or so.

Constantine tries to figure out what’s going on with it and his face suddenly goes white because this isn’t just a rock.

It’s a stone.

It’s _that_ stone.

“What stone?” Barry asks.

“The stone that once held the Sword,” Constantine says. “The real one, not the fake version the Legends encountered. It’s drawn to the blood of Arthur.”

“Well, unless King Arthur was a Jew, that’s not me,” Len says. “Because I refuse to believe that my dad was a descendant of Arthur.”

“No, you’re not,” Constantine says. “It’s following you because it thinks you can lead it in the right direction.”

“Don’t worry,” Mick, who hasn’t let Len out of his arms, tells him. “It probably just wants you to go time traveling.” 

He laughs, and pats the stone, and suddenly the stone is melting to reveal a Sword and there’s light and music and -

“Say,” Len says. “Mick. Didn’t you say that your name was traditional to your family?”

Mick is too horrified to speak.

“You mean Michael?” Barry asks.

“Oh, no,” Len says. “Mick is short for ‘Mordred’…”

The Sword itself isn’t that much of a problem - if anything, it’s very useful - but there’s apparently a cult dedicated to the worship of King Arthur, and it contains just about every wizard and witch and sorcerer out there. Even Constantine technically pays his dues for that cult (albeit very technically - he’s behind, as always). 

And part of what they want is for Mick to marry a nice girl of Guenevere’s distaff bloodline and have children in order for Arthur himself to be reborn.

Mick does not want that.

Neither does Barry.

Clearly the solution is to pretend to be already married - except Len is so obviously Mick’s best friend that no one would believe it, and that means it has to be someone else.

Namely Barry.

It’s going to be fun trying to date when the whole world thinks you’re dating.


	63. Mick/Eddie/Iris, Coldflash - Bar/Restaurant + Poorly Timed Confession

5.Bar/Restaurant AU  
60.Poorly Timed Confession

Okay, so one of my recurring headcanons that I don’t get to play with often enough is that Mick used his inheritance and the proceeds from his early heists to start a small café with quirky flavors and good coffee, and he hired a whole bunch of ex-felons who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere, and he called the place “Jitters”.

Yes, _that_ Jitters. 

See, when Len went to prison sometime later, Mick decided to go in after him, so he transferred control of the original Jitters to his favorite employee (an ex-gang member who was doing his MBA part-time in the evenings). Said employee decided to make the place a chain and it has blew up into being Central City’s favorite coffee chain, and the only thing is - Mick still technically owns it. He has 61% of the original stock, enough for a supermajority vote - he just never does anything with it.

Except Eddie just tried to commit suicide to save the world and now he’s on leave from his job and he’s kind of short on rent. 

Like, a lot short on rent. He has medical bills like crazy and he’s suspended without pay and…yeah.

He needs a job.

Len overhears Eddie and Iris talking about it and mentions it to Mick, and since Mick does appreciate the whole “the world didn’t end” thing, he decides to offer Eddie a job.

“I’m - not that I’m not flattered - but I’m a cop -”

“Not for the _criminal_ thing,” Mick scoffs. “Babyface, I wouldn’t hire you for a criminal thing if _you_ paid _me_. Just helping out at the coffee shop.”

“The - you have a connection at a coffee shop?”

“I own a coffee shop,” Mick says. “It’s - complicated.”

Lacking any other options (and somewhat bemusedly offended at how quickly Mick dismissed his ability to do criminal work), Eddie agrees. Better to be in debt to a supervillain than the Families.

He’s expecting a run down coffee shop-slash-bar in a criminal neighborhood.

He’s not expecting to meet Mick at Jitters, or for Mick to lead him upstairs from the Jitters, or for someone behind a corporate desk to say, “Ex-cop, huh? You want something in security or would you prefer something more management-y?”

Eddie blinks owlishly. “You own Jitters?”

“No,” Mick says.

“Yes, he does,” the guy behind the desk says. 

“I don’t _run_ it,” Mick says. “Basically the same thing.”

“Except for the part where it really isn’t,” the guy agrees. “But to be fair, given that the only thing you do with it is insist that we pay above minimum wage and sometimes hire random people you drag in here like a lost puppies, so I’m okay with it if you are. So, Mr. Ex-Cop, what’s it going to be? I could use someone on corporate espionage.”

That’s how Eddie starts to work for Mick. 

Iris visits. Iris visits a _lot_ once she finds out that Eddie has a private office and a corporate policy that is fairly liberal on in-office canoodling.

Eddie, however, can’t just accept a good thing, so he and Iris keep stalking Mick to try to thank him.

Mick starts hanging out with them sometimes in an attempt to make them stop.

This leads, of course, to Iris telling Barry (as the Flash) that he can’t bring Captain Cold and Heatwave to justice, because she and her fiancé are totally planning on hitting that and they won’t be able to if they’re in prison.

Mick buries his head in his hands.

“Threesomes were an _option_?” Barry demands, outraged.

“Don’t take it too hard,” Len tells him. “Or better yet, take it extremely hard and come drinking with me to forget your woes in my bed.”

“ _That’s_ an option?!”

Mick decides to go back with Eddie and Iris, because he is 95% sure that the entire warehouse is going to be rocking-don’t-come-knocking all night long and he’d like to remain in ignorance of that for as long as possible.

(of course, once Eddie and Iris have him, they’re not letting him go - besides, they can work around the cop thing when and if it happens)


	64. Savitar/Oliver/Felicity - Magical Accidents + Everyone Knows/Mistaken For a Couple

99.Magical Accidents  
63.Everybody Knows/Mistaken for Couple

So, Barry doesn’t kill Savitar because he’s Barry goddamn Allen, and instead he sends him to Star City to be kept by ARGUS, except ARGUS ends up just slapping an anti-speedster collar on him and handing him back to Oliver because they’re too busy for this crap.

Oliver ends up recruiting Savitar to help out with some mystery-solving and Savitar agrees because he’s bored as fuck and, well, he has no idea how he even exists anymore given his failure to kill Iris, so why not?

But the thing is, Savitar sort of doesn’t exist. 

So when the tabloids catch wind of a new someone going in and out of the mayor’s office at all hours, someone seen going around town with the mayor’s wife, they look for a plausible explanation like minority business owner or feel-good campaign prop or whatever and come up…empty. 

He’s a mystery.

Do you know what tabloids love more than anything else?

A mystery that lets them speculate to their heart’s content.

The only thing they agree on is that Savitar is clearly sleeping with the Mayor. Or with the Mayor’s wife. No, you know what? Both. Both is good.

Each of Savitar, Felicity, and Oliver have noticed this - Savitar because he speed-reads tabloids while doing his grocery runs, Felicity during her daily security survey of all online mentions of Team Arrow names, and Oliver because he has a press office devoted to telling him this sort of thing - but each of them wrongly believe the other two don’t know and, further, that there’s no need to inform them of something so patently ridiculous.

Except, as time goes on, it becomes less ridiculous and more…why isn’t that happening? They’re obviously perfect for each other. Even the tabloids have noticed!

But Savitar is just Barry Allen enough to not want to interfere with a married couple, and Oliver doesn’t want to upset Felicity by suggesting that he already wants to go outside their marriage (especially given his past), and Felicity would totally bring it up except for the fact that she’s totally sure she would do so so badly that it’d explode and everyone would hate each other by the end.

And then the magical macguffin box explodes and temporarily gives them all a telepathic bond…


	65. Supercoldflash - ARranged Marriage + Dance + Sleep Intimacy

So, Barry is minding his own business one day when suddenly there’s a great big old booming voice demanding to know where “the Flash” is, so he goes to the city center and finds - 

Kara?

…sort of Kara.

See, apparently the reason Barry couldn’t find Kara’s Earth-1 doppelganger is because in Earth-1, Krypton…well, no Krypton did blow up, but someone actually bothered to make a plan and there’s a colony ship of Kryptonians zipping around.

It was onto one of these ships, in fact, that Leonard Snart got spat out off a black hole connected to the Oculus.

And, well, once /on said ship, he may or may not have decided to save his ass from getting pulverized by swearing up and down that there’s someone on Earth capable of beating a Kryptonian in a footrace.

Now, the surviving Kryptonians are very interested in this, as they rescued primarily their own family members from destruction while thoroughly forgetting the concept of genetic diversity (they were engineers and physicists, not biologists, so sue them), so someone Equal to them sounds great, so Zor-El and his daughter Kara go to Earth with Len to confirm this.

When faced with a “race my daughter or I kill you, Len, and possibly destroy this planet for kicks” threat, Barry agrees to the race and, knowing Kara as he does, is able to win, albeit just barely.

Since Kara is the fastest Kryptonian, that’s very promising: Barry is indeed their equal. 

So clearly that means he needs to marry Kara and have good, strong Kryptonian babies.

“Uh, what.”

Do not be concerned, Earthling! In understanding the limitations of such puny human bodies, as learned from Leonard Snart, they are willing to bind Kara to both Barry and Len, since Len seems to still have those weird Oculus powers and they’re kinda into seeing if those are hereditary, and anyway two Earthlings to one Kryptonian appeases their sense of arrogant superiority. 

“Um.”

“Don’t look at me,” Len says. “This is out of left field for me, too.”

“You don’t actually have a choice here,” Kara says, rather apologetically.

Cue a marriage and an awkward moving-in-together sequence and some scorchingly hot sex, but they don’t really start getting together until the day Len decides to teach them both to dance.

They’re awful at it, but he persists until they’re all laughing together.

That’s the first night they actually sleep together, just sleeping.

After that, things get better.

(but boy is it awkward when Supergirl-canon Kara finds out)


	66. Barry/Len/Mark - Fairy Tale + Poorly Timed Confession

Okay, you know what? I’m going to go with a vastly underused fairy tale that I loved dearly as a child and am now going to bastardize completely called Mazel and Shimazel, mostly because of the punchline.

So Barry’s Mazel, the incarnation of good luck, and Len is Shimazel, the incarnation of bad luck, and they’re walking hand-in-hand through the world of men, as they often like to do, and in particular through a city called Central, which is a very foolish city (though of courses not as foolish as Chelm). Barry is telling Len how much he loves him and Len is being awkward about it and then Barry unwisely says, “I love you so much, I would protect you from everything”, which makes Len laugh.

“Why are you laughing?”

“You, protect me? But I’m the stronger of us.”

“You are not!” Barry exclaims.

“I am,” Len says. “And by far.”

“That’s not true at all. Say, look at this man here -” and here Barry points to a young man sitting on a park bench, his eyes shadowed and hopeless. “- he seems to be in a bad state, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would,” Len agrees.

“I wager you that within a year I can make all his dreams come true.”

“And I,” Len says, “to take them all away within a minute.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Are you afraid to take the wager, then?”

“Not at all!” 

It turns out that this young man’s name is Mark Mardon, and that his dearest dream is to be a supervillain, like his now-deceased brother before him. 

“Well, that’s - uh - actually that’s kinda weird,” Barry says, ignoring how Len laughs behind him. “But I guess I can work with that.”

And so Mark Mardon finds the wand that fueled his brother’s weather-controlling powers and he gets it to work, what luck; he plans multiple robberies that all seem to happen when the superheroes are too busy to pay him any mind, what luck; he takes on the local superhero and wins by chance, what luck.

By the end of the year, he has a peerless reputation as a villain: terrifying and respected and feared by heroes. He is even invited to be the keynote speaker at that years gathering of mad scientists, malevolent villains, and malcontents. 

He gives his speech, full of pride and pleasure, and when someone makes a fuss, he points a finger at them and shouts, “Be quiet, or I will strike you down with my brother’s wand!”

For the year had passed, and it was Len’s turn to act, and he caused Mark to say that the wand was his brother’s, not his own: and all the villains who had once so respected Mark Mardon turned against him, claiming that all he had achieved was on the work of his brother and he merely taking advantage. The heroes soon heard tale of this, and the next time he sought to fight them they merely snatched his wand from his hand and laughed at his impotent rage, even as they cast him into a cell for him to spend the rest of his days.

“Well, shit,” Barry says.

“I told you I was stronger,” Len says smugly.

“Yes, fine,” Barry grumbles. “You win. But what do we do with Mark? As we’ve accompanied him over the year, I’ve grown rather fond of him.”

“And I as well,” Len agrees. “That being said, Scarlet, I wouldn’t -”

But he speaks too late; Barry appears before Mark in his cell, smiling, and says, “Hello, there; I think I love you,” because he had heard that once in a song on the radio and thought it fit the situation nicely.

“Who the hell are you?” Mark demands. “And how did you get here?”

Barry explains.

“Wait - so it was your fault that - I was happy as a minor supervillain! I didn’t even need all that good luck in the first place!”

“A valuable lesson,” Len says dryly. “But I’m sure you wouldn’t object to some good luck now.”

“Well - no -”

And so Barry broke him out of his prison, and returned to him his wand, and when Mark sees that he is free, his head swells up and he says, “With you by my side, I will regain my former position, only better! The world will tremble before me!”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Len says mildly. “For if you accept Barry you must also accept me, and take the bad in equal measure with the good.”

And Mark looked down at the wand and around at the world and thought to himself that who knew what his luck would be on his own, so he may as well say yes and enjoy the company of these two beautiful men for as long as he could.

(“See,” Barry hisses to Len. “I told you I was stronger.”

“You lost the wager.”

“But I got us a good boyfriend.”

“There were _easier ways_ -!”)


	67. Coldwave - Accidentally Married + Massage

51.Accidentally Married  
26.Massage Fic 

So you didn’t specify a pairing, so I’m going to assume Coldwave, mostly because I assume that someone prompting me - someone whose ao3 is like 90% Coldwave - is going with Coldwave as the default.

As for the fic itself, there’s rather a limit on ways you can get accidentally married and I’ve already used half a dozen of them. Clearly creativity is called for.

So Mick is having a bad time of it with his burns, which hurt and constrict his movement, and the doctor recommends regular massages. Mick goes to the one massage place he knows down in the Central slums and asks for a massage.

The receptionist blinks owlishly at him. “You - you do know this is actually a brothel, right?”

“Well, yeah, but I figure if you’re covering yourself as a massage parlor you’ve got to at least have someone who knows the tricks of that trade.”

“Let me ask upstairs,” the receptionist says tactfully, and goes and tells the manager, who looks rather confused by this request (even the policemen who come by don’t want actual massages), and decides to call his own manager and one way or another the story ends up reaching Leonard Snart, Mick’s old partner, who had abandoned Mick after the fire due to guilt and who immensely regretted that course of action, but who couldn’t think up a good way to apologize.

“Tell him he can get a massage up on the second floor room of the motel next door, so long as he goes in and covers his eyes with a cloth,” Leonard tells the manager to say, and goes to the Internet to look up how you give massages.

After all, he can break open safes; how hard can this be?

Mick - who hadn’t really been paying attention to how much time went by, staring as he was into a nearby house fire - is pleased and agrees, and he goes to get the massage.

It starts badly, but even a bad massage is better than none when it comes to increasing the flexibility of burn scars, so Mick goes back time and time again, and anyway the massages get better over time.

“I’d marry you for those perfect hands,” Mick mutters into the table after one particularly good session.

The masseuse, who never spoke, merely presses a pen into Mick’s hand and slides a piece of paper before him.

Mick pushes up the mask he usually wears and squints blearily at the paper, but assuming that it is something in the nature of a bill, he signs.

Some time later, Leonard Snart shows up to his house.

“You!” Mick exclaims, who had actually missed Len very much but who was reluctant to just admit that.

“I’ve reorganized your finances and paid your medical bills and fixed your house and gotten rid of all of your convictions,” Len says. “Take me back?”

“How’d you do all that?”

“Well, we’re married now, so I had access to all of your accounts.”

“Wait. When did we get married?”

Len explains.

“…you idiot,” Mick says. “I would’ve taken you back even without the rest of it.” He pauses, then adds sentimentally, “Probably even without the massages.”

He pauses again. “Though now that you’re good at them…”

And Len smiles.


	68. Coldflashwave - Mutual Pining + Poorly Timed Confession + It's Not You It's My Enemies

"You’re both wonderful people, but I can’t date you,“ Barry explains solemnly. “It would put you at too great a risk from my many speedster enemies intent on ruining my life by killing my love interests.”

“Wait, what,” Len says.

“We’re not asking you out!” Mick exclaims. “We’re just robbing a jewelry store!”

“No,” Len says, “go back to the part where you think that we - a pair of supervillains with weapons specifically designed against speedsters - are concerned about your speedster villains?!”

“Not the point, Len,” Mick tells him.

“Very much the point; I think I’m offended.”

“Sorry,” Barry says. “I mean, you’re both extremely attractive, don’t get me wrong. But the risk is too high.”

“ _Risk_?!” Len exclaims.

“Attractive?!” Mick exclaims.

“This is what ruined my relationship with Iris,” Barry sighs.

“I thought that Eddie fellow coming back from the dead during one of your timeline adjustments ruined your relationship with the charming Ms. West-Thawne?” Len asks.

Barry just shakes his head solemnly. “I hope we can still be friends,” he says, and runs off.

“What just happened?” Mick asks bemusedly as sirens began to come closer. “Did he just ask us out and reject us at the same time?”

Len is focused on a different issue. “He doesn’t think we can stand up against his speedster villains? Well, I’ll show him!”

“Len,” Mick says, already aware of the futility. “That wasn’t the point.”

“Well, I’m _making_ it the point!”

“Are you even interested in him?”

“I could be!”

“Len…”

“I could be pining _right now_!”

“You’re not pining.”

“You’re not the boss of me, Mick.”

“Len…”

Three weeks later, Len delivers three fully frozen and scorched speedster villains to STAR Labs to be locked into its (still incredibly illegal and immoral) holding cells.

“So there,” Len tells Barry. “I told you your speedster villains wouldn’t be a problem.”

“You’ve been pining for me, too?” Barry asks, hearts in his eyes.

“I,” Len says, realizing that in his fit of pique he might not have thought this entirely through, “I mean. I could be?”

Mick, who had moved through all the stages and was now firmly in acceptance, says, “We’ll pick you up for our date tonight at eight.”

“Sounds good,” Barry agrees.

“Uh, yes,” Len says, following Mick out the door. “Sounds - good. See you then.”

After they left the room, he hisses at Mick, “Since when are we dating the Flash?”

“Since you started pining for him,” Mick replies tranquilly, entirely above it all.

“When was that?!”

“Don’t look at me,” Mick says. “You got yourself - and me - into this. But I figure since we did all the hard work already, we may as well enjoy the reward, wouldn’t you say?”

“I thought we became criminals to avoid hard work.”

Mick pats Len on the shoulder. “We did. You did the hard work anyhow. Clearly, you were pining.”

“…clearly. Okay, then.”

And they lived happily ever after.


	69. Coldwest - Flirting Under Fire + Aroused By the Sound Of Her Voice

So, in this one, I think Len joins Team Flash after the Black Hole incident, while Barry is off sulking and fixing Jitters. He doesn’t ask to join, mind you, he just strolls into STAR Labs and declares that he’s going to help with meta crime in Central City in the Flash’s absence because no stinking meta is taking over /his city.

They try to protest, but Len points out that unlike the rest of them, he and Mick at least have cool guns (“That I made!” Cisco exclaims) and a near-suicidal willingness to go out and use them (“…fair,” Cisco allows) and since Barry isn’t around, what choice do they have?

This is how Iris ends up being the tactical oversight of Team Hot&Cold (Cisco named them that as an angry sarcastic joke and is now in deep despair that the name stuck because he can do /so much better), which is a job she rather enjoys and is rather good at it and would love to be doing for Barry except he’s off sulking, and really everything is going really well except for the flirting.

The constant flirting.

“Have I ever mentioned how much I love the sound of your voice in my ear?” Len purrs.

“Bee swarm at 10 o'clock,” Iris says. “Duck.”

“Always glad to have your warm, soothing tones to keep me safe.”

“Hit him! Hit him _now_!”

“Without your dulcet whisper, I would -”

“Die? Yes, probably. Mick, would you please blast Len with your heat gun?”

“No,” Mick says, but he’s smirking. “I’ll give him a smack, though, if you’d like.”

“I would, thank you.”

“Ouch!”

“Thanks, Mick.”

“Pleasure’s all mine.”

Except, well, the flirting is kind of…fun. Eddie wasn’t actually much into flirting - he was extremely relieved to be in the actual relationship part of the relationship, and a good part of that was the ability to stop trying to flirt - but Iris has always enjoyed it.

And, well, maybe she’s not ready to start dating again just yet, but Len doesn’t seem to expect reciprocation of any sort. He doesn’t seem to have any expectations at all, really; he just seems to like the sound of his voice and the puns and the flirting.

So Iris starts flirting back.

Len responds by upping his game.

Iris, always competitive, responds by upping hers.

By the time Barry comes back, she’s gotten into a habit, and so has everyone else. She tries to lay off the flirting once, because it seems mean to Barry when she knows how he feels, but everyone (even Barry!) starts asking if she’s feeling okay because they’ve started measuring her mood by the quality of her innuendo, so she gives it up and starts up again.

Anyway, she ends up walking in on Barry and Mick making out in a closet at STAR Labs, so clearly Barry’s doing just fine emotionally.

And then Len gets kidnapped by his dad and it’s a whole thing and now they’re kinda-sorta covering up a murder but a really justified one which makes it - okay, not okay at all, but understandable and really Lewis was more of a toad than a human except Iris would actually feel bad for killing a toad - and suddenly Iris realizes that she actually would like the flirting to mean something.

Except she has no idea if Len does.

She decides to take a page out of the “If Barry thinks it’s good romantic advice, do the opposite” book, which means she takes a private moment and just explains the situation to Len and asks his opinion. 

Len grins. “Why, Miss West,” he drawls. “I thought you’d never ask.”


	70. Interlude in a Wood (Coldflash, hints of Coldflashwave)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a horrifically belated birthday gift for @a-redharlequin, who requested an elaboration of the Coldflashwave Red Riding Hood Short Fill (Chapter 55)

Barry's world was red, and he was content.

No - not content. 

That word couldn't capture the intensity of the feelings he had, their sheer extremity: the wild, aching joy that pulsed through his body; the wild relief of an untraveled road thought lost forever but now found again; the deceptive feeling of safety, of freedom, of letting go and knowing you would be caught and held and loved; even the pure physical bliss of being caught taught between pleasure and the slightest delicious curl of pain given as a gift of love.

Barry wasn't content.

Barry was _happy_.

Barry was _Red_.

Red marked his world right now. Red was the rope that curled around his wrists, tight and secure and strong enough to hold him safe. Red was the cool silk that was dragged across his body as he shivered, or, as it was now, wrapped around his eyes to blind him to anything but the sensations that he could feel. Red was his skin, bearing the imprints of lips that kissed him and teeth that bit him and fingers that pinched and stroked him in turn. Red was his body, warmed by his lover, left both wanting and yet endlessly fulfilled. Red was his cock, jutting up from his body, sore from coming but hard and ready to go again. 

Red was the Flash suit, abandoned on the floor. Barry hasn't worn it in - days.

Weeks.

More?

Time had no meaning here.

The Dreamwoods have no need for the Flash, after all. His story isn't theirs, not yet; it wouldn't be theirs until it had been repeated a million times in a million ways. 

No, here Barry wasn't the Flash.

He was just Red.

He was _better_ than Red.

He was -

"Scarlet," Len murmured, his lips moving alongside Barry's neck. He was Len now, not Snart, not Cold; just Len, like Barry had guiltly thought it might, late at night in the dreams he didn't share with anyone. He was Len, Barry's Len, and in turn, Barry was - "My Scarlet."

"Yes," Barry said.

Len's mouth moved down from his neck to his shoulder, and maybe his teeth were sharper than they should be, colder than they should be, sharpened chips of ice, but that didn't bother Barry in the slightest.

He trusted that Len wouldn't hurt him. 

Well.

Not _too_ much, anyway.

Not any more than he wanted him too.

"All mine," Len said, and the greed in his voice was all for Barry. "Mine to hunt, mine to stalk, mine to capture and put in my bed -"

He slid his knee in between Barry's legs, which were forced open, splayed until he was exposed, tied at the ankle to the posts of the bed by ropes of red, bound to a delicious stretch. He pushed, just a little, pushing Barry's stretched legs just that little further until Barry grunted.

"Mine to play with -"

He ran the sharpened nails of his fingertips up Barry's side, causing a shiver, then reached over and twisted a nipple until Barry groaned - then released it, making him cry out again.

"Mine to tease -"

He nipped at Barry's shoulder, leaving another half-circle that would fade too quickly - not as quickly as when Barry was in his mortal body, his speedster metabolism too quick, but still faster than he would have wanted.

"Don't tease," Barry begged, all shame long abandoned. Who needed shame when your every desire was only a request away? " _Please_ , Len -"

Len chuckled as he drew back. Barry could tell by the way Len was pressed against his body that he’d reared back to look down at Barry, and knew that Len’s eyes were going over every inch of him, alight with the pleasure of possession. 

He knew, because Len had done it so many times before. 

It'd taken Barry a while to come to terms with the fact that yes, Len really did want him, really did find him attractive, really did enjoy feasting his eyes on him. But come to terms he had, so he arched his back, pleading as much with his body as he had with his voice, and Len laughed.

"You want me, then?" Len asked. He'd had to get over that, too: the knowledge that the touchable Scarlet he'd lusted for, lusted for him back. He'd gotten over it much faster than Barry had. "You want the big bad wolf?"

"Yes," Barry breathed.

"But you're _Red_ , Scarlet," Len said, and his voice was fond. "And I'm the Wolf in the Wood: if you come to me, I'm going to swallow you right up. You know that's how the story goes. Is that what you want?"

" _Yes_!"

"Good," Len said, and leaned his head forward to wrap his lips around Barry’s cock.

Barry rolled his head back onto the pillow with a groan.

Barry didn't know what time this was, how many times they had done this, how many times this story, like their story, had been repeated. It could be the fifth time, the fifteenth, the fiftieth, the five hundredth.

He didn't care. 

Here in the Dreamwoods he had Len who he’d thought he’d lost, and Len had Barry who he’d thought he’d never have, and Len would swallow Barry time and time and time again with his teasing lips and his devilish tongue and his oh-so-sharp teeth, and Barry –

Barry loved every goddamn second of it.

Here, Len could drive him to heights of pleasure he had never even dreamed up, pushing him to his limit and pulling away, swallowing him down the whole way, then letting Barry’s hips arch up to set a punishing pace only to force him down by his hips to set a torturously slow one.

“Please,” Barry begged, half out of his mind. “Please, Len, _please_ , I need you, please, take _pity_ –”

Len hummed around him, a low laugh that vibrated through Barry’s bones in a way that his speed never had. 

After all, neither the Wolf nor Len had ever taken pity on anyone.

Barry lost track of time as he lay there writhing, Len bringing him just to the cusp of release only to pull away, replacing lips with hand, drawing his fingernails down Barry’s sensitive inner thighs, cupping his balls, letting Barry just barely come down from the heights of delirium only to catch him, put his mouth on him, and drive him even higher.

Release, when it finally arrived, came as a burst of white light, a shock to the spine like being hit by lightning – and Barry would know – and he cried out Len’s name as he came.

Every muscle went limp, and Barry’s head fell back on the pillow, his eyes unseeing.

When Barry finally came out of his daze, he became aware of a hand stroking his hair, of the fact that the cool silk of the blindfold was no longer around his eyes but loose around his neck, of a feeling of peace like he could never have comprehended before he came here.

"You did good," Len was murmuring. "You did so good for me, Scarlet, my Scarlet, my _Barry_ ; you did so good and all for me -"

Barry murmured wordlessly in pleasure. Yes, he had, hadn't he? It'd been good: good for both of them.

He opened his eyes and looked up at Len.

Len, who smiled with his sharp wicked teeth, the teeth of the Wolf.

Len, who leaned forward to steal a kiss, their mouths coming together, his hand on Barry's jaw to guide him.

Len, who pulled back, his eyes aglow, and said, "Again, I think."

Barry made a whining noise that was half-protest, half-agreement; he wasn't entirely sure which.

"I promised I'd swallow you right up," Len said. "And I will, as many times as I can."

He looked sad, then, and almost what Barry would call guilty, if pointless guilt had ever had any part of Leonard Snart's soul. He knew, just as Barry knew, that this would not go on forever, that eventually they would be forced to leave this bed, this safety, this interlude, and they would have to continue on with their story.

And in their story, the story of Red and his Wolf, they were not alone.

A Hunter was coming.

A Hunter was coming to put an end to it all.

"But not yet," Barry said, and leaned up for another kiss, which Len gave him freely. And then, though his body screamed at him for it, he said, "Once more."

If the end was coming, then Barry wanted every second of it: every ounce of pleasure he could wring out of this time, every moment of Len's company, everything he could get.

And he knew Len wanted the same.

Len grinned, a flash of teeth, and leaned down again.

Barry moaned and let his head roll back, let himself see nothing but red, let himself go once more. 

( - _and in the distance through the window he thought he could see the Hunter, but the Hunter was more familiar than he thought he would be, familiar and friendly with a wry smirk and strong arms and power that could master anyone, even the Wolf, and Barry was not afraid_ -)

Len's teeth were at Barry's hip, his tongue wetting the skin it touched; his hands were on his thighs; the weight of him on Barry's legs.

"Scarlet," he said. "My Scarlet - all mine -"

And Barry saw nothing but red.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [coldwave, not-a-dark-AU [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13263936) by [litrapod (litra)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/litra/pseuds/litrapod)




End file.
